I’ve always been a little amused by the life-long followers of “The King.” He came along earlier than my first musical influences, so I, of course, think that the world began with the Beatles. Still, there is something there that I clearly don’t get, or people wouldn’t still dress up like him and hold conventions. The Elvis Impersonator, an entertainment business that started shortly after Presley himself began performing, is something I think of as iconically American, even though there are any number of people from around the world who have joined in the fun (including a few women).
An Elvis Presley promotion photo for the movie Jailhouse Rock (1957, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Inc.) and an Elvis impersonator.
Meet Elvis, the Gute lamb, shown here with his Shepherdess, Carina. He was shorn for the first time last fall, and Carina listed it as one of 3 she had for sale on the brokerage site Ullförmedlingen. I was able to convince her to ship to the US, and that started my Elvis adventure.
To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure what drove me to buy the fleece. My attraction to it was that Gute is the oldest breed in Sweden, and is part of the gene pool used to create the modern Gotland sheep. Gute are raised these days primarily to conserve the breed, so they are few in number. You can’t go online to fine Gute yarn, so if I wanted to understand and appreciate the wool from this sheep, I would have to make my own.
Because I’m not a very accomplished spinner, Elvis has spent the last year in my studio in a plastic bag. I’ve opened the bag from time to time to make sure nothing has gone wrong, and to inhale his sheepy goodness. It’s also fun to run my hands along the locks and feel the lanolin, thinking about washing him and spinning him, “one of these days.”
The opportunity presented itself this past week when Josefin Waltin posted a notice for a mini-course called Fleece Through the Senses. You can sign up for and take the course at her website.
I’ve spoken about Josefin on my blog frequently, so it’s no surprise that I’m a big fan of hers, and will pretty much sign up for anything she offers because I know I’ll learn many new things. This course was no exception, and from my point of view, is a fundamental part of learning how to be an educated spinner. What she taught us, in part, is that spending a little time to educate your hands on the nature of the fleece will help inform your choice of spinning method and, perhaps, improve your final yarn.
For the class, you could choose an already washed or an unwashed fleece, but I saw this as a chance to overcome my worry about what to do with Elvis, and so decided now is the time. When I fully opened up the fleece and spread it out on the table on our screened-in room next to my studio, I was struck by just how much wool I was going to need to sort. The locks were easy to separate, with several sort of gummed up together at the cut edge. There was a lot of brown that isn’t the natural sheep color, and ultimately was clearly dirt, with a healthy dose of “poopy bits,” and a significant amount of vegetable matter (vm) in the form of twigs, grass and bits of leaves. It took two washes to get rid of all of the “dirt,” but even that didn’t remove all of the vm. What I also discovered was that the shearing had not been done with hand spinning in mind, so there was a large proportion of second cuts and locks that had been cut very short. I probably lost close to 40% of the fleece to the parts that were unusable. The up side of this is that the compost pile just got a big boost of new material.
Each day’s lesson came with a series of questions to answer about the fleece, and it was fun not only to try to learn about your own fleece, but to read the responses from the other students. We also got feedback from Josefin, along with suggestions to build on what we had learned. For example, she recommended that I could either go with the kemp in my carded sample and let the kemp wiggle its way out of the yarn later on, or try a different carding technique to leave more of the kemp on the card (or in my case, mainly on the floor). The fiber expert Deb Robson (Co-author of the Fleece and Fiber Sourcebook) has an interesting blog post from 2010 with some good descriptions and photos of the differences between wool and kemp in South Wales Mountain Sheep.
The result of the carding Josefin recommended involved laying the locks on the cards with the tip end extending beyond the edge. I then gently pulled the locks through the pins on the carding cloth, leaving behind most of the dark kemp. You can see the difference at the left. I was really surprised to discover that Elvis has mainly white wool, although there won’t be all that much of it by the time I’ve finished processing. My goal is to have enough for spinning some Z-ply that will make a pair of two-end knitted fingerless mitts. That’s probably a ways down the road.
Meanwhile…
I’m working away on my Capstone sweater. The design has been modified again (I think we’re on plan C). I sent this pic of my progress to my mentor so that she’ll know I’ve not fallen completely down the rabbit hole. The most interesting part has been determining the right spacing of the increases in the seed stitch juxtaposed to the decreases for the v-neck slant. There have to be at least as many increases as decreases to keep the fronts the right width at the point you reach the shoulder, but at the same time, additional increases to account for the width of the collar around the back of the neck. I graphed it out on Excel, but made several modifications as I worked when I discovered that if they fell too close together, the line of the V-heck began to curve.
It was good that I chose to do the left front first, since the decreases occurred on the right side and the increases on the inside. The right front will have both on the right side of the work, so less of a problem keeping track.
Since I completed the back for the grey/green tweed sweater with the blue seed stitch trim, I now need to think of how to complete that sweater. It seems a shame to let all of that work go to waste, so we’ll have to see what I can come up with. I’m enjoying working with more than one color, so the front will probably be another stab at intarsia…or cables…or, or, or…… too many ideas, too little time.