More dyeing and drying

Been a busy day.  Yesterday I had kettle dyed a good lot of the remainder of the fleece from batch 2 using yellow food colouring.  It had to cool in the pot overnight to room temperature, then I rinsed and rinsed and put it out to dry.

There should be enough here to make quite a few yards of yarn, to use with my yellow/orange locks.

Yesterday I had also finished dyeing more locks, I knew I needed more yellow/orange, and I played with some green/blue ones as well.  Add those to the stash.

Today, I weighed out another kg of fleece from one of the bags I purchased at the Canadian Cooperative Wool Growers, and got that soaking.  It's now out on the drying screen.  There are some beautiful big fat locks in there.  It's just too bad there is so much vegetable matter in these fleeces.  It's going to take a lot of work to get them prepped for spinning.

I heard that the farmers who ship their fleeces to these cooperatives, only get about 40 cents per pound for them.  These are all Canadian raised fleeces.  If they knew what kind of demand spinners, weavers and fiber artists alike have for these, maybe they'd take a little more care in how their fleeces were raised, and subsequently, advertise them on the various websites.  They could get so much more than 40 cents per pound.  There's even a facebook page for farmers to sell their Canadian fleeces.  We really need to get the word out to them.

On Ravelry, we also have a group where we list the farmers that we know locally who make their fleeces available to us.  But there have to be so many more farmers that have no idea... given the skids upon skids of fleeces that were just sitting there at the coop.

Off my soap box.  While the fleece was soaking... I made another batch of fabric softener.  Jim and I had stopped at the dollar store the other day and since I knew we were out, I picked up a couple bottles of cheap creme rinse.  Really nice... lavender & chamomile scent.  It's so easy to make, and much cheaper than buying the pre-made stuff at the grocery store.  I even used some of it in the final rinse of my fleece... heck, it has lavender.. that's supposed to keep moths away... not that we've had a problem with them at all.  Couldn't hurt right?

Last night I spent some time spinning the white fluffy clouds that I had prepped.  Oh my!  Does it ever spin up nice and thin.  I think I'm going to use this as a core for something later.  Now I'm going to go outside and prep more fiber for spinning.  I really really need a wool picker but can't afford one.  I need to find someone in our guild who has one that I can borrow for a few hours.  That would make prepping these fibers so much easier.  But, for now, I'll do it all manually.