Shiny!

March 11, 2016 by curvylou 6 Comments

My sister Wendy reminded me a few weeks back that I never shared what I bought at Lambtown, all those months back, and this post has been in my drafts for a while. Perfect time to post it, as I’m too beat to come up with anything new this week. We’re recovering from our plague, Matt’s back at work, but we’re still dragging.

In the meantime: Lambtown.

My purchases were sequestered for several weeks because they were in the epicenter of the poison oak plague that took me down hard last October.

Over the past several months I’ve dug things out from the sequestered pile, and bit by bit resumed using it—anxiously awaiting a poison oak re-outbreak that never came.

I got to the bottom a few weeks back, took pictures of the Lambtown goodies huddled there, and wow, was I ever on a shiny kick when I bought this stuff!

This wasn’t properly a purchase, but I did come home with a large pile of lustrous, hand-dyed fleece from Natalie Redding’s dyeing class. I love these colors, and I’m curious to see how it spins up.
 
 
 
 
 
Champion mohair (goat) fleece, picked purposely for use in hand-spun sock yarn. The mohair I originally purchased for this is full of… well, you don’t want to know. This is beautiful, clean, incredibly lustrous ram fleece, with an excellent pedigree. Grand Champion means that it was not only the best in its class (likely light-colored ram handspinning fleeces), but it was also the best of all the mohair fleeces submitted to all the available classes at Lambtown.

Left, Ipe sawdust, and right, mahogany, from Trif’s Turnings. Inexpensive, repurposed wood-turning waste. Ostensibly good for dyeing. We’ll see.

Above, up front is raw silk yarn, behind it is silk boucle.

And here, diagonnaly in the the middle, both around the cardboard cones and in skeins at top, is about 1200 yards of silk parachute cord. It took me about two hours to wind this into balls. And very smooth and shiny there? At the right?

That’s I-don’t-know-how-many-million miles of pure, garment grade, unreeled silk. Each thread is about as fine as a human hair. It is beautiful, heavy, luxurious, and luminous. I haven’t an earthly what I’m going to do with it, but I’ve never seen anything like it and I had to have it. I’m just hanging onto it. And thinking.