Boreray fleece to yarn...

 I have just finished spinning Boreray fleece into yarn. There's 100g washed weight here, 450m of what I'd call heavy laceweight or light fingering yarn, with a gradient at the end (or the beginning). I love it, and now I have to decide what to do with it. This wool came from Orkney Boreray - this year Jane has some exceptionally nice fleece that deserved to be handspun. 


This is what it looked like skeined, with a 20p piece in there to show thickness. 


And this is straight off the bobbin and unwashed. It looks desperately overplied, but that's because the singles had been hanging around a bit before plying and had time to set their twist. I do like a yarn with high twist, which I think shows off the wool nicely but also makes it more hardwearing, whatever I do with it. Because it's woollen-spun, the yarn still has a soft, airy handle.


About to be plied, both bobbins having been rewound. These are the Majacraft baby bobbins (not the lace ones), used with the lace flyer. I spin most of my singles with this set up, as I tend to be spinning fine fast yarn. There was five metres difference when I plied them together.


The difference between a rewound bobbin and one just as the yarn's spun on. I tend to rewind everything now; it makes plying not only easier but  much more regular. The rewinding gives the singles a chance to spread the twist out.


I do love a nice rolag, as anyone who has taken my long draw woollen spinning workshop will know!


All the finished rolags, stacked neatly in the box that my new hiking boots came in (shoe boxes are extremely useful for storing rolags, especially if you have cats.) There were 28 white rolags and 14 grey rolags in each half. 


I pretty much randomly carded the grey fleece, but then laid all the grey rolags out in gradient order and split them into two equal stacks. Once I'd spun half the white rolags on to one bobbin I carried on with the grey, so each single was a matching gradient. 


Washed fleece: there's a tiny bit of scurf, and you can see the odd coarser hair, but it's lovely wool. And with it being roo'd rather than shorn, there are no blunt ends to cause scratchiness in an otherwise skin-soft wool. 

I washed the wool split into two laundry bags, to give it space to move around but not so much space that I lost the lock structure. These were dunked in very hot water with a decent amount of ordinary washing-up liquid, left for twenty minutes with occasional careful squishing, spun out in a freestanding spin dryer, rinsed for ten minutes in equally hot clean water, spun out again, then hung up on a sunny afternoon.


I did a quick sampling of spinning the wool either washed or raw. Both made a nice yarn, but after washing the plied yarn, I found the yarn spun from the washed and carded wool was airier and more consistent than the one spun from raw wool. 


Unwashed fleece, as I unpacked it from the box. Really nice stuff, you can see a lovely lock structure straight as it came off the sheep; Jane had roo'd this wool beautifully, retaining the shape of the fleece. There was absolutely no wastage in washing or processing. 


And this was what I had to do immediately the box of wool arrived - grab a small lock, rinse it, handle it, brush it out. Boreray, like many of the old and native sheep of the North, has an interesting feel to it. The wool I got from Jane has a lovely soft handle, but there is also body and texture to it that you wouldn't find in a more 'domestic' sheep. There's the odd guard hair, but those popped out in the spinning. The carding produced a few neps, but they fell off in the spinning too.


And these are the sheep the wool came from, partially roo'd: 



Comments

  1. I loved seeing your process here! I have never spun Boreray and cannot remember spinning a purposely roo’ed fleece so this was pretty interesting to read. Thank you for sharing it!

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