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July 25, 2016

 The 3 fleeces I have are white.   I've been spinning them in rotation, all using the long draw and yes, they are all still white.  
  I love the long draw because it is a very fast way to spin, giving soft, elastic and lovely, warm yarn as a result.   But all that white was starting to get a bit dull.  After not spinning for a couple of days in a row, I dug up a bunch of small lots of leftover fibres and dumped them into acid dye vats, using leftover dyes from other projects.  The blue/pink blend is Merino.  The green is BFL and nylon.  The navy and orange is the 32 micron fleece I just got from the Wool Coop.    Here is where I say - label, label, label!  The jars of dyes were leftover from other projects.   They had colour names on them but at that time, I didn't dye with anything else and was pretty certain that I only used 1% solutions.   However, the navy was supposed to be a blend of colours and much lighter according to the math.  I'm guessing though that the navy dye was actually a 2% solution and it really changed my anticipated results.   Each new jar of dye that I make up, now has the appropriate information: colour, type of dye, dye solution percentage at the very minimum.

The green is spinning up beautifully.  It is BFL and nylon blend seconds, probably superwash.   The Black Lamb usually sells these super cheap at the Fleece Festival and it is well worth the money.  It is always lovely, dyes well and is nice to spin.  It will be great for socks.  I spun the first bit using without processing the roving but have started running the rest through the drum carder first.  It just makes it that much easier to spin.

I think of this as my Deep Space 9 project.   I've always loved Star Trek, but was never really fond of Deep Space 9.  However, my sweetie got me hooked when he played the very first episode when I started spinning this, which I'd never seen and boy, was I hooked quickly.  Sigh, and I really am not fond of watching t.v... but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do :)

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