For several years, I have been accumulating a stash of breed-specific spinning fibers. In looking back at my blog, I believe the first time I mentioned breed-specific spinning was in January 2015. I wanted to do some breed-specific spinning to build my working knowledge of wool. I started spinning to understand yarn. In order to understand spinning, I need to understand fiber.
When I started buying breed-specific fibers, I was buying prepared fibers. However, I realized that some fibers are not available prepared, which led me to purchase multiple raw fleeces and scour them myself, as I’ve written about in January 2018 and February 2018.
While I have continued to accumulate breed-specific fibers, I have not spun them. I have, however, taken several classes at PlyAway and SAFF to help me in this process. This includes classes in long draw, how to process fleece after it is scoured, and one of Beth Smith’s breed study classes.
This year, I’m going to be start spinning some of my breed-specific stash. My friend Stacy will be joining me in this endeavor. We haven’t worked out all the details of this yet, but we will both be blogging about our experiences with the same breed. Sometimes we will be working from the same fleece or sample and sometimes we will be working from what we happen to have in our stashes. If I process the fleece from raw, notes on the processing will be included in the blog post, along with notes on the spinning and finished yarn.
This blog post will serve as an index to all the other posts in this series. I will go back and look through my prior posts to see if any are still relevant and if they are, I will link them here. When we write posts about a new spin that is part of this study, I will also link to it here. I will link back to this post from all the future posts on this topics so you can get back here easily, but you might also want to bookmark this post for your reference if you want to follow along.
The SassyBee Fiber I’m spinning is 100% Polworth, so Polworth may be the first fiber on our docket. Stacy is checking her stash to see if she has any. Since we haven’t worked out parameters, I can’t give you a specific timeline for when we will be publishing our first breed-specific post, but I know it will be this year 🙂 Stay tuned!
Goals
Here are any posts about goals or timelines or parameters of this project.
Inventory
I’ve posted a few times about Inventory. I’m working on a spreadsheet with a complete list and once I have that finished, I’ll link to that here.
Oh wow, thanks so much! It’s absolutely fascinating to read through what you’ve linked and see how you process a fleece. I’m just venturing into the world of spinning on a drop spindle; so I’m still learning a lot!
And, it’s thanks to you that I now know what I distaff is! Thank you!