We’ve reached the end! And it’s a big and colorful end to this last year’s subscription group. Blooming For You brought us beautiful spring flower fields as inspiration and a set of lovely fleeces to work with. Our main base is a pair of East Friesian/Romney/Coopworth cross ewes named Trinity and Nina from Open Book Farms up in Maine. Nina is your pink and purple base and Trinity is the yellow and creamcicle orange. I really like the long staples and medium feel of these ladies. Trinity is definitely a bit softer than Nina, but they represent their East Frisian heritage well as it is their primary makeup. Open Book Farms has been a joy to work with and knows her sheep well. I have the biggest hopes watching this farm learn and grow each year. And she is shearing in the next couple of months! Hint, hint!
The locks we have included in this set come from a Lincoln and Suffolk cross that we picked up at the Michigan Fiber Fest. This fleece ended needing quite the rescue mission! It took first place in its class and I didn’t look as closely as I should have to the inner portions of the bag because the outer fleece was just so beautiful and I could see exactly where the shepherd was going with crossing these two breeds. When we got home, we ended up finding significant damage in the center of the bag from its storage prior to the show which was a huge shame. The shepherd handled the mishap so, so well and it is just something that can happen. A cautionary tale to store fleeces properly and make sure you are looking at every fleece very carefully at purchase.
In the end, I was able to rescue two thirds of the fleece from the situation and I just knew we had good wool sitting in there. Each lock was plucked by hand and strength tested to get the best pieces out of it for our subscription and it was entirely worth the effort. This blend will create a strong and elastic yarn. You’re going to see us explore wool-heavy blends in this year’s Cottagecore Subscription and this one was a step towards that.
Our other inclusions are some bare Soy Silk to add to your “paint box” of silks and some dyed Mohair to really drive towards a strong and soft yarn. There’s loads of color inspiration here and combos to pursue. You can mix and match colors, card the locks in or spin them in, and also play with mixing the ewes’ fleeces or keeping them separate. I ended up choosing to do a set of mini solids from the leftovers to play with. Below, I have hand-fluffed all of the fleeces to prepare it for my carder.
After one pass, these ladies were so smooth! I layered the fleece and Lincoln/Suffolk locks multiple times thinly to increase how blended they would be. Since these are so small, I only utilized half the width of my standard sized carder to ensure a proper packing density of the batts.
For the second pass, I knew I wanted the Mohair and Soy Silk to be very bold to stripe within the final yarn. The purple half of the Mohair was used for the purple and pink batts and the pink for the yellow and orange.
Since these are so small and make such excellent experimenting packs, I chose to work on my consistency in long draw spinning and it made just the fuzziest little yarn babies! I’m really pleased with the results and the yarn feels strong and bouncy just as I’d hoped from such a blend. The singles were spun entirely on the same bobbin and then chain-plied and broken off at each color change.
Thank you again for joining us for this first year of our subscription! I am super excited for all of the plans heading forward in our next year of the service. We have a whole bunch of pretty fleece stockpiled for it already and some wonderful additives for thoughtful blends. We have more slots available for the next year! We hope to see you there.
Fossil Fibers 