Debie, the well-traveled fleece is finished!

 For those of you who are listeners to my podcast, you've already heard about Debie a lot. And no, that's not a typo, that's how the sheep's name was spelled on the tag. Debie, not Debbie. For those of you who don't listen to the podcast, let me fill you in a little.

I went to Retslaff spinning day (which I probably spelled wrong AGAIN) a few years ago and purchased Debie's fleece. Debie has a lovely silvery grey fleece and she was one of 2 grey fleeces I purchased that day. I was in a grey place. In fact, I think I may have purchased 2 additional silver fleeces that year.....like I said, I was in a grey place.

At any rate, I can't remember when I begun spinning her, but this is what she looked like when I started spinning her, a little angry cloud. I had literally POUNDS of her to spin.  But if I got her a couple years ago and was actively spinning her, why did it take so long? Well, 2 very good reasons. The first is that I don't generally spin anything  but "cheerful" fibre in winter. I get mopey if my spinning is grey while it's grey outside, so I primarily spin brightly colored items.  The second reason is that Debie turned into the Well-Traveled Fleece.

I bought Debie 3 years ago. I dropped the dirty fleece with my favorite processor, Morrow Fleece Works, and then promptly forgot about it. Afterall, when you drop off a fleece with them, it's like preparing yourself a surprise gift. Since they do so much processing - and since they tend to do all one color at a time, you can have a fleece sit with them for a couple months before you get it back. This fleece didn't show up, but I got an invoice. I paid it, but no fleece came. Then the truth came out - the only address I'd given for the shipping was my job - that I had left months ago. Whoops!

So, Debie was sent to my old work. But my old company had more or less closed it's doors by then, and forwarded the fleece to PA. I eventually had it sent back to the original workplace. Then I got to go pick it up. Debie was definitely worth waiting for. Look how silvery she is!

By the way, I apologize for the pics, I am HORRIBLE at taking pictures, even though I have had some very patient people try to teach me.

 Look at that! BUTTER! Grey Butter?  This is the - look at my surprisingly even spinning even though I did this over the course of a year off and on. Seriously. I'm impressed as I just spun it without thinking too much about what weight I wanted at the end or what the singles should look like. This was an endurance project, not a perfection project. My goal here was just to spin an entire fleece and, thereby, hopefully get better at spinning by spending the time practicing well....spinning. So the overall good uniformity is a pleasant surprise.

Here's a little bit of it knit up. I was trying to see about what it would look like on a few different sizes. Afterall, with more than a couple of lbs, this will likely become a sweater for me or for my husbean. I think he wants one, but I doubt he wants grey.

And here is a bunch of it piled up in my window seat. I believe I have something like 7 or 8 big fat skiens of this to knit. My handspun bin is getting very full. I'm going t need to start knitting more and spinning less (and I don't mean knitting more sock yarn!)