Mystery Wool....tribbles?

It's time for a project update to Bill's Mystery Wool Vest.  You may recall this was raw fleece, as in shorn off the New Zealand Mystery sheep from whence it came.  I washed it shortly after it arrived and slowly processed it for a sport weight 2 ply yarn for Bill's wool hand knit vest.  And now, the latest news...

I forgot I have a flick carder.  When I decided it was time for concerted effort to get this Mystery Wool processed, I suddenly remembered it and tried it.  Brilliant!  The flick carder fluffed up the fibers, helped me see which were too short to card, pick out the pilly bits, twigs, and other vegetable matter.  Truly, it made the carding easier.

The first photo shows nearly all the stages of this wool:  batts that have made a single pass through the drum carder (at the right edge of the photo), the twice-carded 'nests,' two bobbins of singles on my kate (and on the window sill), and finished skeins of yarn from the first two bobbins of singles.

The carding is complete.  It took me about 12 hours of carding.  Not bad, I guessed 16 hours in the previous post.  Oh, the seemingly endless carding.  You know, it wouldn't be so bad, but the work must be done slowly, else too much fiber is wasted.  It's a practice in mindful patience.  You can't rush and you can't space out - you have to watch the crank speed and monitor how the fiber is feeding.  And when you look away, that fiber inevitably creeps away from the center of the drum to be entangled on the drum and becomes useless.  

This was a natural, undyed fleece from a brown sheep with wide color variety. I tried to bring the color to a common-ish ground by running the fiber through one pass into a pile of 8 batts. I split the batts in half, divided up the piles into a spectrum of light to dark.  Then paired up a dark and light half batt.  Each pair was run through the carder a second time.  Two passes were surprisingly effective and yielded a nice middle brown. 

I got as far as spinning one of the newly carded batts and just needed to step away from my spinning wheel.  Even though this wool has been scoured, three times, as I recall, run through the drum carder twice, it is still very sticky.  Any benefit my hands get from the copious lanolin is counteracted by the hand sanatizer I keep nearby to cut the grease. 

Once all the batts were done, I left my little nest of batts on the table, under the window, in my craft room.  Bill went to the craft room this weekend looking for envelopes (that's where they live) and I heard him laugh.  I thought it had to do with the envelopes not being in the location I told him.

Oh no.  We've been watching "Star Trek - The Original Series" lately and when he saw the batts, he thought they were Tribbles.

Now that all the fiber is processed, I have to make the concerted effort to spin all these tribbles.