BreedSchool 2.1 Collected (2024)
Fibre: 12 different breeds of prep’ed natural colour fibres
Yarn: Various — mostly 2 ply
Method: Wheel spun, some SFD, some long draw
Completed: September 2, 2024.
If you look at posts over the last few years, there hasn’t been any spinning, other than the odd bit of spindle-spinning. It might seem like I’d given up the hobby. Not at all! I was doubling down 🙂 . I signed up for Sheepspot’s “BreedSchool 2.1” in 2021. The premise was: a year of monthly shipments of different breeds of wool, with some instructional videos and a whole cohort of spinners who would be working through sampling and spinning the same fibre. I wanted to do something that would encourage a systematic approach to spinning, and that specifically encouraged sampling and learning. I was also hoping for interaction with other spinners. This was successful for me in terms of the former — but because I was so very slow, I missed out a lot on the latter.
The first fibre arrived in July 2021, but I had other things going on and wasn’t able to start the classes until December 2021. It took me until very early September 2024 to finish sampling and spinning all 12 months of 150g prep’ed fibre shipments. I just don’t have that much time to spin.
My approach was to watch the lessons, do the sampling for the month, do the spinning of the fibre for the month, and then stuff it in box with the other completed spins. I enjoyed pretty much all the different breeds — even the Herdwick, which was very sheddy! But, it was still a bit of a surprise when, to make the final photoshoot, I pulled out all 12 skeins of finished yarn and looked at them in their collective glory.
Hot damn, that’s a lot of spinning! And some of it’s not bad 😉 .
I intentionally focused on making each skein its own project (based on what that wool wanted to do) — so they’re not really similar enough to each other to make a wrap-up project easily. (I could do squares. Not sure I want a blanket, though).
- Targhee top (July/January 2022) — 418yds 2-ply woolen spun (long draw from the fold)
- Whiteface Woodland (August/February 2022) — 120yds 3-ply (long draw from the fold)
- Southdown (September/March 2022) — 343yds 2-ply (SFD no twist)
- Gotland (October/April 2022) — ??yds — 2-ply (long draw from the fold, with a lot of struggling because of longer and shorter staple lengths in the fibre mix)
- Perendale (November/June 2022) — 182yds (long draw from the fold)
- Rambouillet (December/November 2022) — 597yds 2-ply (SFD no twist)
- Black Welsh Mountain (January/March 2023) — 129yds 3-ply (long draw from the fold)
- Corriedale (February/October 2023) — 154yds 3-ply (SFD with twist)
- Manx Laoghtan (March/March 2024) — 97yds 3-ply (long draw)
- Shropshire (April/May 2024) — ??yds 2-ply (long draw from the fold)
- Teeswater (May/August 2024) — 160yds 2-ply (SFD no twist)
- Herdwick (June/September 2024) — 230yds 2-ply (SFD with twist). This one was REALLY floofy and bulky!
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