In my last post, I left you wondering what had happened to the other 2 and a quarter pounds of my Finn fleece.  Admit it, you’ve been worrying about it all week.  So here is how it breaks down.  12 ounces of the fleece, I didn’t even bother to wash.  The fleece had not been well skirted and there was still a section of unmentionably dirty wool.  If I run short on yarn for the project I am starting with it, I may get desperate enough to wash it, but I sure hope not.  So with the 1.75lbs of yarn, that leaves only a half a pound.  This was the fluff that was left behind when I carded the wool.  The nice thing about the carding process is that it tends to separate different lengths of wool.  Most of the longer fibers went into the splits that I have since spun into a nice three-ply sport weight yarn.  (I’ll post pictures of that when I go to dye it.)  The shorter fluffy fibers were left behind but could be run through the carder again to produce felting batts.  But first… I dyed them.  Spring is here in a big way in Virginia, so green was on my mind.  I have lost my big dye pot… Don’t ask, so I had to work in small batches.  I never realized how many pigments go into the color green.

Quite a mess of color.  I decided to make a virtue of the problem by testing the blending ability of my carder.

The different colors create a heathered effect.

Not too bad.  I can turn these layers into nice wool felt pretty easily.  But since I’ve decided that I want to create a hat from them, I have to wait on getting a hat form.  I have been inspired by the work of Jasmin Zorlou.  Her video on You-tube is awesome.