No, not the exercise kind, the fleece kind!
That's what I always have to clarify when I tell non-crafty friends about spinning. I doubt that anyone reading this blog would have any doubt as to which kind of spinning I'm referring to. :)
Yesterday a local friend who keeps a few sheep dropped round two fleeces. This morning he brought the remaining two. They are Derbyshire Gritstone, and this is only their 2nd shearing. The fleece is lovely and soft and, since he only had to shear these four, he also took care to pick out any particularly soiled parts of the fleece and discard them.
The result is a lovely fluffy, and remarkably clean fleece, so I thought I might try to spin it from the raw fleece rather than wash and process it before spinning.
I spun a large bobbin of pretty rough and slubby thick-ish yarn this morning just to test it. It's not perfect, and it's pretty over-spun because I was still experimenting with the yarn thickness, the fact that it wasn't carded, and the tension on the wheel, plus boy #2, who is off school due to a bad cold, helped a bit, but despite all this I'm actually pretty pleased with the results.
Spinning the raw fleece was actually really fun, and it's so much quicker than having to process the whole thing beforehand! Since the yarn has far too much twist in places I'll probably ply it to balance it a bit more but I can see a lot of spinning from unprocessed fleeces in my future!
It looks good to me, what do you intend to do with it?
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