Busy work for those long dark days of winter

Much spinning has been happening.   The white is some regular BFL.   I've now got a bit under 500g spun in a similar weight.   The pink is one of my fall dyeing experiments which is mainly pink and purple, with some decent bits of blues and mauves.   It's a superwash BFL.   Both spun up nicely and when I sit down to it, quite quickly.    The white is about worsted weight while the pink is really fine and should be somewhere in a light sock weight/lace weight.

I've gone on a bit of a wool washing binge.   I don't really like to wash fleece in the winter but this is a medium grade fleece of unknown origin and I have need of something less fine that all my pre-processed fibres.  It's really too coarse for wearing close to the skin.   I'm going to spin it up for rugs, so it's perfect for that.

This is the first wash water - ugh, it's really, really dirty.   It's only taken 2 washes though to get the fibre clean.  The first batch only took 2 rinses as well.  It's fairly low lanolin, which really helps.  The second batch though, I used too much soap, so it's going to need a couple of extra rinses.  It doesn't take that much extra actual physical time, but does take up a lot of waiting time.

 There is lots of VM in it so I'm thinking this will be run through combs for processing.    

Kevin has been inappropriately interested in my large trash bag of fibre and it's been a chore to keep him out of it.   

I took a rug hooking class the other day.   I finished the actual project, except for rolling the edges.   It was a lot of fun.  The black wool strips were cut a little bit on the bias, so they were very shreddy.  It made them fluff up a bit and combined with my lack of experience, made my sheep's ears disappear.  Still, I'm happy with how much fun it was and how quickly the learning curve was.  The class was pretty good and covered lots of information.  I think the only things missed were different ways to hold the hook, in which it was mentioned but never demonstrated, and how to actually tension the fabric in the hoop, which may or may not be an issue if you get it tight enough to start with.

  I'm going to spin up some yarn to use for rug hooking, as it seems like a good way to use up bits of yarn and fleeces which may have no other use.   But if you have scraps of real wool fabrics, I'd love to have them.  They don't have to be awfully large as there is lots of shading and dyeing of mixed lots to make up the unique colours.