A quiet week

Pre-shearing season sure makes for a quiet week! 

We did find a few things to do though.  We had an order that included 12 1/2 lbs of what I call kitchen sink blend:  multi-colored, multi-micron, multi-length fiber.  We all get it.  But what to do with it?  We were asked to make felt.  Ok.  But, as you know, the felter has been, well, tweaky.  And when I put the kitchen sink blend into the tumbler, it scared me!  It got fuzzier and fuzzier and hairier and hairier!  Something like this:

We added a couple of pounds that had fallen out of the tumbler from other batches of the fiber in the order, bringing the total to something like 14.5 or 15 lbs.  Given the quality of the fiber, a bit of it ended up under the carder.  The shorts and guard hairs end up there.  We lost about 4-5 lbs of the starting weight but the flip side to that is, we did not think anything would make it through.  And 2/3 did.

Surprisingly, it made kind of nice batts, like this:

And then it made, with everyone's fingers and toes crossed that the felter would work, pretty nice batts.  Ok, not nice like for a purse or a blanket but just fine for insoles or a boot mat.

This is a laborious process at the moment.  In order to get a 14 or 16 oz piece of felt, we need to create 3-4 smaller ones, hope they make it through the first time, then put 3-4 pieces of felt through to join together.  This is why we have called a moritorium on making felt for you at the moment.  But come July, what a breeze it will be!  Otherwise, Craig will look like this all the time (and no one wants this!):

Zoe was a huge help over spring break.  And she had some great ideas for colors and yarn ideas.  She really liked the tricolor yarn we did earlier for a client so we did some because she wanted to.  Fawn, med brown, and bay black were the colors she chose.  We also did another nice yarn at her suggestion but somehow I missed getting a nice photo.