Saturday, July 30, 2011

Little Scamp

Last summer my dad and I went to Texas to visit my sister (who now lives in Utah!) and on the way to Caddo Lake, I thought I saw a weaving shop.









Good thing the road construction slowed us down, because it really was a weaving shop called Rose Path Weaving .  This store was kind of fun and unique because they had all kinds of fun little rooms in the store set up for each fiber craft.  I think people could even rent little spaces to sell their things.  My brother-in-law said I had 5 minutes, so I quickly went shopping!  I found this bag of beautiful and soft fiber from a mystery animal named Little Scamp.  The color is gorgeous and the texture is so soft you almost can't feel it at all!  AND it made a great travel pillow that my sister and I passed back and forth throughout the trip home!



 
Here is the mysterious Little Scamp:




I'm not sure if it's an alpaca or a llama.... but it's a pretty animal!  Maybe someone else can help to identify...


Anyway, at the shop I was talking with a young inexperienced spinner and she said I should NOT card the wool.... thought that was weird but I've never done this kind before so I took her advice.  When I first tried spinning it, I did nothing with it but open it up a little bit.   It was pathetically awful... this stuff doesn't stick together easily like most sheep's wool.  It's very slick and disintegrates very quickly as soon as you stop spinning.  It wasn't very fun to spin at first... so I put it away for awhile.  Well, after playing with my looms for a whole year, now I've had this itch to spin so I took it out again and tried carding it with my drum carder. 




The drum carding made a HUGE difference!




It organized the wool nicely into rolags and now it's so easy to spin.  I do have to watch it when I stop because it can still disintegrate quickly, but now I don't have to keep stopping to open up new fiber clumps.  I'm glad I gave it another try!



And I plied a small piece and it holds together really well!  In fact, it's very strong once it's plied!




I have 2 lbs to spin!  When I'm done spinning, I think Little Scamp is going to be a beautiful and soft shawl with a great Bronson Lace texture weave!




 Thanks Little Scamp somewhere in Texas for your beautiful fiber!