It’s the week before Fiber School and I am running around like a chicken. (Honestly, you don’t need cut cut off their heads to make them run around like crazy people.)
It’s also the weekend of the Harvyeville Fair. Ron & I are making the popcorn for the outdoor movie they’re showing downtown tonight, and I’m supposed to help Marta with a spinning demo at the Wildcat Hollow booth tomorrow, but aside from that, no commitments for the fair. I plan to eat a funnel cake, watch the parade, and probably get right back to work. Realistically, I’ll probably spend a bit more time there, because this will be the first fair Ron’s been home for in 4 years. But Yarn School helper Charlene and my mom will both be around to prep, so it will definitely be a weekend of sweaty TCB.
Last week, I made a field trip to Hutch to pick up some State Fair fleeces and some sheep supplies (sheep mineral, a new coat for Uncle Honeybunch).
First stop was Midstates Wool Growers, where they sort and bale commercial wool from the region.
Incoming bags to sort. The other side of the warehouse had twice as many. These are each about 8′ tall. They’re dumped on a conveyor run up to a platform, where Alex stands and grades the wool and throws it into the surrounding bins.They’re huge wooden bins with sides that fold down. When there are enough of one sort of wool, they’re taken to the baler and compressed into giant 1000-pound bales.
64s, fine wool. Mostly “Territorial wool” or “Western wool,” which is based on several fine wool breeds and crosses. Lots of Rambouillet around here.
French is the shorter of the fine and superfine, stuff that’s best for combed top AKA French combed top.
We drove out to the Fair to get the fleeces. I bought 5. They’re commercial fleeces, scored on a commercial basis, so it’s a lot different from what you’d see for a handspinner’s fleece competition, or a state with a bigger wool culture. The raw materials (fineness and quality of the wool) trump all the other factors. The commercial fleece can have a ton of VM/dirt without ill effects, because those aren’t an issue in large scale processing. I had to laugh, with the care I take with my own sheep–blanketing them and keeping them out of the hay as much as possible–then seeing some fleeces that were extraordinary but treated like they were from meat sheep (which they probably are–Rambouillet are a dual-purpose sheep, meaning you can eat them or spin them). They’re obviously out on the range or being fed chopped hay from feeders that are efficient but do nothing to keep the bits from being ground into the fleece. It made me want to go track down some of the winning animals and spirit them back to Cupcake Ranch with some fancy new threads.
Except that the best fleeces were typically Rambuoillet, which means a giant beast of an animal, more like a pony than a sheep. My Romneys are as big as I want to handle. Apparently some of the nicest fleeces came from animals at a blood farm, which I had never heard of. They’re grown to raise blood for lab culture. They’re well cared for and kept in pretty optimum health to keep up good blood production, which makes for a quality fleece–but not necessarily a clean one.
While Alex went around for his truck, I got to make a mad dash around the Fair. I didn’t realize we’d be going out to the fairgrounds, so I did not come prepared. No cash. And I’m a crazy throwback with no ATM card (a self-preservation measure), so no access to cash. Which is probably for the best, because I would have probably scarfed down a Krispy Kreme cheeseburger and some deep fried Oreo and rode the teacups and then been full of remorse for the nearly 3-hour drive home.
So I just checked out the free part of the petting zoo. Baby goats!
(With my feet in the picture, to show scale.) Then I headed to the Poultry Barn.
These two went up and down like this for several minutes, their hackles raised, yelling at each other in an angry rooster version of the mirror game. It was a hoot.
These game cocks just look like dinosaurs to me.
And these ones are the 80s skaters of the poultry world.
Are you kidding me with those crazy labial wattles and that over-compensating comb? You have to imagine that the original breeder of this type of chicken was sexually frustrated. I love these birds. So garish.
These ones look like their brains exploded out of their nostrils and eyes, some horrible X-Files virus. Okay, enough with the Poultry Barn. Back to my fleeces.
Here they are, skirted and bagged. I got to skirt them all pretty aggressively, and I avoided any that seemed like the bulk of the dirt & VM wouldn’t fall right out in a good wash. I’ll have them for sale by the pound in case anyone from Yarn School wants to take some raw fleece home to play with, but mostly my plan is to use it all for custom blends of combed top when Zeillinger has their winter sale.
4 of them are very fine Rambouillet, and one’s more in the Romeny category, which I got for Fiber School. It should be much better suited for quick hand processing than the Rambouillet. If I have time, I’ll wash and dye it of them with dye dregs–the old dye still left from the last session of Yarn School.
I like to mix up fresh dye for class, so I typically use up the old stuff first. It works just fine, just has some settled sediment and is inevitably at weird concentrations from some of the lids being left off for long periods. I usually just strain out any sediment as I go and dye up a bunch of random fiber for the fiber buffet/carder bar.
I dyed up 20 pounds or so of tops last week. Some of this will be going into some carder mixes, but most will wind up on the fiber buffet.
Okay, back to work!