Washing and weaving

I've been washing fibre.  It's one of the fleeces I picked up at the Ontario Wool Growers coop last summer.   It's short, soft and springy.  It was a smallish fleece, but still, it's turning out to be a lot of washing.  Because I'm drying it inside and not in front of the fire, it's taking a little longer to dry.   It's cleaning up nicely.  I'm using a degreaser as well as Dawn dish detergent.   I've been so tempted to start dyeing the fleece, but I'm worried I will have too many small amount of fibre and no real project in mind for the colours.

I spun a sample using a long draw and it was rather nice to work with and the results were very lofty and soft.

I tied on a narrower warp to the previous rug warp.   I'd run out of 4/8 cotton, so used 2/8.  This worked well because these aren't actually rugs, but yardage meant to be bags or place mats, etc.   I think if I'd had more of the heavier yarn, the white squares would be much brighter, but still, the effect is still there.

I forgot to take a photo of the blue sample which I'd woven before the grey one.   This is the underside of the loom.  I'm using 3 strands of 2 ply carpet yarn for the grey, but the blue was 1 inch wide strips of jersey fabric from a thrift store sheet.  These are supposed to be used for samples for photographs for a future class the guild is teaching.


I was a little worried in between projects as Kevin decided that he was going to use the loom as a jungle gym.  He spent a rather long time exploring the hanging ends, which were only lightly tied in front of the reed.    Thankfully, he wasn't too invested in the exercise and was fairly easily distracted.  He only chewed on one thread, which wasn't going to be used anyway, since this project is only 11 inches wide and the warp I was tying on to, was 26 inches wide.