Fibery Tidbits

I have been working on spinning up some plain wool yarn to dye into more Mix and Mingle colors. I really like how they have come out so far and they seem to have gotten a good response (i.e. views) on Etsy. I start with what I can get for the time being. I finally caved recently and got an order of the Sheep Shed Mill End Grab bags. Monetarily the price can't be beat. However, as is the case when purchasing things like fleece you do more work trying to prep then you do with the more expensive already processed "nice" roving. Case in point; I purchased four pounds of mill ends grab bag i.e. whatever they send me. Roughly a pound of the mill ends are colors including black, brown red and a little blue. Then there is another pound thats mostly batts that have been cut off the machine. Then of course there is the regular mill end roving bits and the mohair mill end roving bits.
Yes, there are a lot of mill end roving bits.


So after just a few hours of spinning I was already through the easy to use roving mill ends. Next would be the easy to use batts. Unfortunately almost all of the batts had cut ends. Fortunately, I had the experience with some of the cut ends from the roving and manufactured a plan. I took all the batts and carded them into ... well, batts. I basically recarded the wool which there by eliminated the hard to deal with blunt cut ends and made the wool soft and bouncy and easy to draft. Yay me!

The other thing that I did was to divvy up the rest of the undyed bits and started dying them. I have green and yellow that I did this past weekend. I will also have purple and hot pink which I am doing today. The plans for these bits are to card them up with all the variations of colors, texture, glitz and anything else I feel like putting in there. I'm really excited about this but wish I didn't have to wait for the other wool to dry tonight. Where is an air-only dryer when you need one!