Hill Radnor British rare breed review

The podcast episode for this blog entry is number 107.

This was the last fiber in my British rare breed package from Hilltopclouds.  It was the only unwashed fiber, which never bothers me, I like learning about how a fiber is in the grease.  It was low lanolin and very easy to wash up, going from an off white to very nice white color.

Unwashed

Washed

I would describe this as medium everything type fiber, medium length locks, medium softness, medium crimp. It is a very lovely fiber to work with.

I found I had to pick the washed fiber completely open, then it both combed and carded well.  I did two passes with hand combs, finding lots of short stuff caught in the tines as waste.  I decided to take a photo showing why the top was so lovely.

On the top of this photo you see all the waste removed, and below that the top I pulled off, which was so wonderful to spin.  When I was spinning the top I felt a slight slickness to the fiber, reminding me of Lincoln fiber, only not as long.  There was a very slight halo to the yarn too, unusual in worsted spinning.  The 2 ply yarn was 12 WPI and I got 22 yards.

I drum carded the other half of the washed fiber into one big fluffy batt.  For being so fluffy, the carded fiber really didn't like being spun woolen, I ended up with a semi woolen spinning.  So the yarn was smoother than a woolen spun yarn would have been.  The 2 ply yarn was 12 WPI and I got 33 yards.

Here's a photo of the yarns

Combed top skein is on the top and carded batt skein below that.

I have shown all the skeins of yarn from these British rare breeds to spinning friends and they all commented how soft the yarn felt.  There seems to be a misconception about all rare breeds having coarser wool.  Every breed of sheep have specific characteristics to their wool, rare or not.  It was worth the time and cost of doing this review, just to learn there are rare breeds with soft lovely wool to spin.

Tiniest skein

Back when I was working with the Portland fiber, I plied the skein of worsted 2 ply and had some of the very thin single left over.  I took it off the bobbin wrapping it around my three fingers.  I laughed at the size of this tiny skein and decided to keep it.  I tied it and slipped it off my fingers, and it proceeded to crinkle up like a scrunchy.  So I just held it under warm water until it was saturated, squeezed it out and looked around for someplace to put it to dry.  Obviously I could have just laid it on a towel, but decided on this instead:

Really the best part of sliding it on a vitamin bottle cap was it was a perfect fit and effectively worked to block the skein.  Now my tiniest skein looks like this:

Just for comparison here's the whole Portland photo again

The large skein upper left is the 2 ply that my tiny skein didn't get in.

Whitefaced Woodland fleece review

This post relates to the Yarnspinnerstales podcast episode 104 where I continue my review of British rare breed sheep fleece samples.  This is the Whitefaced Woodland breed.

There were two types of unprepped fiber in the sample, where some had more intact locks.  When I saw this I decided to only pick open half the sample and comb locks for the other half.  Then I got even more involved and split each of the halves, so I ended up with four types of prep before spinning.

For the worsted yarns I prepped by combing locks and also by combing with my handheld combs and pulling top.

The top is on the top of this photo, with the combed lock under the tag.

For the woolen I chose the obvious hand carded prep and then also did a cloud prep, where the fiber is just picked open as much as possible before spinning.

The cloud is on the left.

Here are close up photos of the yarns and details. You can see the yarns go from thin to thick with the preps.

Top yarn was a single of 21WPI 2 ply of 12 WPI. The 18 yard skein shows it to be a very smooth yarn, good for high definition stitches in knitting or sock yarn.  The combed lock yarn was 17 WPI single, 12 WPI 2 ply 17 yard skein.

Both woolen yarns spun very thick and thin due to the prep.  The cloud single was 16 WPI and the 2 ply was 9 WPI in the 17 yard skein. The carded batt yarn was the worse because the fiber used for it was the worse of the sample.  So it spun very lumpy. The single was 18 WPI and the 2 ply was 10 WPI in the 18 yard skein.