Wishing everyone a joyous holiday and New Year

Stopping to wish everyone a joyful holiday season and a very Happy New Year. The fiber diva is (temporarily and somewhat regretfully) trying to turn domestic diva for the Christmas holiday, since the whole diva clan is gathering at my house for Christmas dinner and presents. Which, of course, means a flurry of cleaning, shopping, cooking, and decorating for me in the next several days. Which also means that I must first move all the fiber out of the living room!

To give an example of what I mean, here are the pics of the fleece from the breed swap that I mentioned in the last post.
You can see the bag of unwashed fleece here. I did wash a bunch and send the 32 individual baggies of locks to the breedswap "mom." Which means I only have......about 2.5 pounds left to wash! Yeah, don't ask me why I thought I'd need a whole 3 pounds of fleece for 32 locks.

Of course, more fiber in the house is never a tragedy. The fleece is from a Coopworth white lamb. I don't think I'm terrible efficient at washing, but it is coming out a lovely off-white, definitely losing a lot of dirt from the raw fleece you see in the pictures, and pretty soft. I even managed to spin a little from the locks, though I think I'm either going to borrow or buy inexpensive cards to finish the rest of it. I say "inexpensive," because as much as I value having had the experience of processing fleece from it's raw form, I've decided that I don't really want to keep doing it. I'm happy working with processed roving. Speaking of which, this is roving that I used both for the roving and for spinning short lengths. And yes, I apparently thought I'd need 3 lbs of this to make 32 one-oz bags and 32 yards of spun yarn. I mean, I was plying it, so I guess it's reasonable that I'd need.....yeah, like 2.2 lbs. But I'm going to spin up the rest of the roving and try making felted slippers. I might even try dyeing the yarn once it's spun. But this is a nice silver-grey, so I think it will make nice slippers this way or combined with the white.

And finally, I'll leave you with a visual explanation of why the fleece has had to live in the car for a while. This is Emma...chewing on the plastic bag full of roving. Because the roving has been processed and so contains much less lanolin and what I call "sheep smell," Emma is more interested in the bag here. But the fleece? She loves the fleece, and I mean, loooooves the fleece. It's like the old joke---"with this much sheep smell, there's gotta be a lamb to play with in here somewhere," and she will dive head-first into the box of fleece if I turn my back on her for a moment. Worse, invariably when I pull her out of the box, she's still licking her lips and making (kitty) yummy sounds. "No, no, bad kitty, mustn't eat Mommy's sheep!"

And with that, I wish you all a very happy, healthy, and fiber-goodness--filled New Year!