Polled Dorset Fleece

How it started:

How it's going: 

Silly memes aside, I am incredibly pleased to finally be done spinning this Polled Dorset fleece I purchased in May 2019.

The Lake Metroparks Farmpark in Kirtland, Ohio hosts a Shearing Weekend in May each year.  My impression is that the event's target audience is more general public for awareness and exposure to sheep than to a fiber arts crowd; however, they did have a small marketplace set up that year.  I think I actually learned about the shearing weekend through an Instagram post from one of the dyers I follow who was vending there.  I was interested, and there were several events aimed at kids (like a shearing demonstration of a rainbow-dyed sheep!) so it was a great little weekend trip for our family.   

The Farmpark has sheep of several breeds.  As a very new spinner who was just beginning to understand just how many different breeds there are and how different their wool can be it was great to see so many different sheep in person.  I was especially excited to see that they had a handful of sheep that are on the Livestock Conservancy's list for Shave 'Em to Save 'Em.  My experience with sheep is mostly at the county fair where there are only a few breeds and they are all meat sheep that are shorn before showing.  

In addition to the outside vendors who were set up at the market, there were a couple long tables set up with fleeces for sale.  For the most part these were not really being marketed to spinners.  They were selling them for their horticulture use really.  (i.e. Stuffing flower pots, mulch, compost...)  I remember there were several Jacob fleeces, but I had already purchased a Jacob fleece earlier that spring so I was looking for something different.  I found a polled dorset fleece that was pretty dirty and had quite a lot of vm, but it was sound.  I found someone and asked about the price.  There was some searching and asking around, and eventually I was told it was something like $2.50/lb.  The fleece was about 7 lbs, so I paid under $20 for it and took it home.  

One of the reasons I was interested in the Dorset fleece was that I had heard it was unlikely to felt.  I figured that with that characteristic and the low price, it would be a good fleece for me to play around with dyeing.  So that is what I did.   

When I got the fleece home I skirted it heavily.  I'm not sure if it had  been skirted at all.  At one point I even wondered if I actually had more than one fleece in that bag because there was so much wool.  My prior experience was with that Jacob fleece though, and they are much smaller than a Polled Dorset so I think that probably wasn't the case.  The ironic part is that much of that fleece did end up in my garden.  I still had quite a bit left though!  

Since I was going to be doing the dyeing in the kitchen, and with kids around, and I wasn't very experienced with dyeing, I decided to try out Wilton gel food coloring, like what you would use for icing.  I bought a 12 pack on Amazon and tried out kettle dyeing one color at a time in a (now dye-dedicated) pot on the stove.  I also did one with pink lemonade kool-aid because a friend of mine had some really interesting results with that flavor.  My results were much more exactly the color you would expect from pink lemonade.  I left some fiber undyed as well.  When I was done I was left with piles of fiber that resembled a clown wig, but it had not felted!

 

And then I stored it away and it sat for months.  

It sat until late winter 2020 when I was starting to feel some vague apprehension about the future from listening to the news.  I started combing.  I have to be careful with combing because I find it can be verry hard on my elbows and wrists, but it can be a really great physical outlet when you need it, kind of the same way kneading bread can be. 

I distinctly remember putting a comb down to read a text from a friend who informed me that our governor had just cancelled school statewide for three weeks starting the following week.  Some expletives may have escaped my mouth at that moment as I was just beginning to feel how serious things were about to get.  I went back to combing.  Did I mention it was a great physical release for stress?

The combing released a ton of dirt and tiny vegetable matter.  That is primarily why I chose that method of fiber prep.  I also had a lot of waste, which is typical for combing anyway, but especially in a fleece like this.  The colors I had dyed were really interesting in the locks, especially the black and violet dyes because they had "broken" but when I combed them together they combined enough to be more cohesive, yet the combed top still retained subtilty and had a heathered appearance.  

I finally finished combing all the locks.  I moved on to combing and carding and flicking other wool.  

Then last winter I started to give some more serious thought to what I wanted to do with all this fiber.  My mind went to socks first.  I decided to play around with blending some pinks together on the drum carder, along with some firestar, silk, and mohair to strengthen the blend.  The results looked a lot like house insulation.  It might have been the color, but it did amuse me.   I spun those batts into a skein of yarn.

Next, I decided to spin up three colors into singles and then ply them together for a 3-ply sock yarn.  The black, royal blue, and violet became a nice 3-ply.  I was trying to spin the singles thin, but with 3 plies it still came out to at least a sport weight.  

I was pleased with the results and spend the remainder of 2021 spinning up the singles of one color at a time.  I did do a little more blending with the yellow, orange, and salmon pink colors at one point, but that batt was also spun up and became a ply, I stuck with a worsted draft with and while it had a little more texture than the combed top it was still quite strong.  

At one point I did take one of the colors and overdyed it.  I believe it was originally dyed with Wilton's Brown, and it just wasn't exciting to me, so I used Cherry Kool-Aid to give it new life.  Since I had already combed it the dyeing process did compact (but didn't felt!) the wool, so to fluff it back up I put it through the drum carder.  Of course I can no longer remember what draft I used to spin it, but the result, whether from prep alone or also from draft was definitely more towards to the woolen end of the spectrum.  

By the end of December all the remaining Polled Dorset was on storage bobbins and ready to ply.  I briefly considered taking the last few days of the year to ply it all up, but I wasn't sure how I wanted to combine the colors just yet, and I thought it would take me more time than I had.  In reality, once I decided how I was going to ply, I was able to knock out five skeins in two days time.

I started with yellow, gold/orange, and the bobbin of the blended batt.  Next I moved on to the undyed, green, and light blue.  

 

The more I looked at the bobbins of the "copper cherry" as I called it, the more sure I was that they shouldn't be sock yarn and instead they should be a 2-ply that could be used in colorwork.  That skein is different than the others, but it was also a useful illustration of the different ways you could handle this wool.

The pinks went together next.  At that point I was left with several partially filled bobbins.  I decided to ply all the leftover singles together and came up with a really interesting yarn that reminds me a lot of Fruit Loops!

Now I guess it is time to start knitting some socks!