Of winter, and fleece, and all things indoors

hey folks.  Guess i'm not feeling very blog motivated these days. Sorry.

However, i have been keeping myself busy (of course!)

my daughter is doing better everyday with her home education. she's beginning to sound words out fairly accurately, when prompted, and is starting to learn about telling  time.

 

strawberry mead,  brewing right now! yum!!

my first knit sock. no, really! i'm using a sock loom. it's slow, but very interesting!

I've recently purchased some icelandic fleece, and have washed a pound of it...

 

Yup, that's what a pound of fleece looks like.

It washed really really easily, and i'm very happy with the result. i also washed an 'extra' bit the seller threw in. unfortunately, the grease had hardened, and i was unable to completely clean it. I will be trying to comb and spin it, but don't expect fantastic results.

Icelandic fleece is much different than your 'average' white wooly sheep's fleece. it has two different parts of the hair, a long coarse hair, and a much shorter, very fine hair.

this fleece is grey, however you may notice that the skinny ends are dark grey, while the fluffy thick bits are light grey.
I decided to test-separate some of the fleece, because as far as i can tell, they did that historically (the coarse hairs had one set of uses, the fine another set. makes sense to me. dual purpose fibers.

 

as you can see, the fibers are very different in color once separated. The fine hairs were actually nearly perfectly white if i take all the coarse hairs out!  However, i'm only going to pull the longest and coarsest, leaving a bit of grey in the softer fibers.

some yarn i've spun, drip drying after being washed and set.

a little yarn porn  ;)  my most recently finished yarn. it's 50/50 alpaca and wool

and this is my currently-being blocked super-crazy colorwork crochet project. (in case you're wondering, it's a row of running feegles, a la Terry Pratchett)

hope everyone is staying warm, and planning your gardens!