Familiar sheep

That bag of wool in the last post?  And those abominations of hats I tried to crochet from said wool roving?  All that wool is on its way to a very nice lady who spins, who kindly did some test spins for me to see whether I liked 2-, 3-, 4-, or 5-ply yarn.  If you're not familiar with that, all of the wool was spun into one thread of fairly even size.  Plying is when you twist 2 or more of those together.  If you take apart almost any yarn, you'll see several strings twisted together.

In this case, the 2-ply was about the thickness of #4 or worsted yarn, with the others being bigger as more plies were added.  

I rolled the 2-ply into a ball and sat down to crochet a simple hat  using double crochet to get an idea of how it felt.  A little stiffer than commercial wool or acrylic, little bits of straw here and there entwined in the yarn, but not bad.  The next morning during the summer intern presentations at work (it's okay, they know me and my peculiarities there) I rolled the rest of it into balls and worked up another hat using the 3-ply.  More of a job, and stiffer - I could pull the first hat over my head (it was a little small for an adult) but although the second hat was about the same size (using fewer rows of stitches) it wouldn't stretch that much.  Considering the effort it took, working with the 4- or 5-ply would be just too tiring, and the 3-ply is stiff, so 2-ply it is.  Also considered that for a given weight of wool, the more you ply it, the shorter the final yarn will be.

So I stuffed the roving into two vacuum storage bags and sucked out all the air.  On the package, you see blankets and pillows in nice neat flat bags, but these bags had the shape and beauty of a crumpled tissue.  No matter - off to the post office, where the woman at the counter found me a much smaller box than I would have thought possible to fit it into, but with pushing and grunting we got them packed, sealed, and mailed.  So somewhere around 4 pounds, probably, with the disassembled hats, at $15 a pound to spin.  When you consider that 3 or 4 ounces is a typical skein and the cost of those is at least $3 on sale, more for wool, that's not bad.  

I plan to make hats for the farmer to sell at farmer's markets where she sells her other products.  After discussion with the spinner, it didn't seem like we could do much in the way of dyeing, so the hat base will be this gray, but then I can accent with purchased colored wool.  Add ears and a mane, it's a horse hat.  Add a red comb, a yellow beak, and eyes, it's a chicken hat.  Add tassels and braids, including other colors, it's a nice earflap hat.  Once I figure out loop stitch, sheep.

While I wait for the yarn, I continue working on projects for my fundraiser for Mercer Street Friends.

You'll notice that I have apparently very little control over how these pictures are placed. Yarn I can handle, computers not so much.