Jacob Sweater - Shania

It all started last March when I bought a fleece from Kingsfold Jacobs. The fleece weighed 2.5 lbs and was from a ewe named Shania

Her fleece was soft and fine enough that I thought it would be ok for next-to-skin wear and I decided right away I wanted to try to spin the wool into yarn for a sweater.

I started by separating the fleece by color. Some of the wool was easy to sort into light or dark. It gets harder around the borders of the spots. The locks stick together (especially when they are still full of lanolin) and so I made a third pile that would be more of a gray tone.

I kept these three piles separate through the scouring and carding process so that I would end up with three different natural shades of wool for my sweater.

I did do a little sampling to determine how to process it. I knew from the last Jacob fleece that I had that the drum carder would likely create a lot of neps with this fleece. The locks of Jacob wool are triangular and the tips can get tender. They will typically break off in processing, but in the drum carder (unless you pre-flick the locks to remove the tips first) they are really hard to pick out and end up creating a tweed effect. That can be cool if that is what you are going for, but it was not what I was going for this time. The raw fleece was only 2 1/2 lbs, I think it was a little under 2 lbs after scouring. I wanted to be sure to have enough yardage so I really needed to minimize waste in processing: that meant that combing was out. The locks were about 2-3" so theoretically I could have combed it, but I prefer combing slightly longer locks. I tried out carding and was happy with the results. The fleece was very light on vm so I didn't have to worry much about that, and I found I could usually pick out the tips or just pull them off the lock before loading up the comb if they were especially tender. These were usually easy to spot because they tended to get a bit cotted. Carding was also a win because I really do enjoy woolen spinning and that method was going to give me higher yardage as well. I used my 72 tpi hand cards and they were a good match for this wool.

The next step was to actually spin the yarn on my spinning wheel. I spun this on my Kiwi 3 on the 7.5:1 ratio. The Kiwi was my only wheel at the time and this spinning project is what really spurred me to get serious about acquiring a saxony wheel for this type of spinning. As I mentioned, I spun a 2-ply woolen spun yarn to get a light airy yarn. Then the yarn sat waiting for several months while I finished other things and thought about what I wanted to knit with the quantities of the three natural shades I had.

As you may know, I've been participating in The Livestock Conservancy's Shave 'Em to Save 'Em initiative to bring awareness to rare and endangered sheep breeds here in the United States. On January 12 they kicked off a sweater challenge and since Jacob is one of the conservation breeds, it was a perfect time to actually get to knitting the sweater.

One of the reasons I had been slow to actually get knitting was that deciding what to knit was really hard! At first I envisioned a colorwork sweater. The yardage required for some of the patterns I was considering gave me pause. Finally I decided that a colorblock sweater would probably be the safest bet. I initially planned to use something like Ann Budd's book of Top Down Sweaters to plug my gauge into and knit something up, but I encountered a problem when I knit up my gauge swatch. On US 7 I was getting 17.5-18 stiches per 4 inches. That is about 4 1/2 sitches per inch, and the book only gives numbers for a whole number of stitches per inch. I wasn't about the change my needle size because I really liked the fabric I was getting, so instead I searched my library for sweater patterns with a gauge of 18 stitches/4". It was Tin Can Knits to the rescue! They provided me with two options. The first was Flax. I had already knit a Flax a few years ago and knew it could work as a good basis for a raglan. The second option was using the aran-weight numbers from the Strange Brew guide to make a yoke.

I decided to go a the raglan instead of a yoke. There was already going to be enough going on with the color changes so I eliminated the garter panel on the sleeves as I knit the pattern this time. The advantage of having knit this pattern before is that I knew how it fit me and I was able to make some choices about how to knit this sweater based upon that. I choose to add short row shaping to raise the back of the neck and although it is the more annoying way to knit the neckband in my opinion, I did choose "option 2" in the pattern to pick up stitches for the collar from the cast on rather than beginning the sweater by knitting the neckband first.

I finished it with a week to spare in the challenge! It is my first handspun sweater and it was really amazing to go through the whole process from fleece to garment!