Knit Sisters

I cast on for the felted tote bag Monday night, after posting and while watching Studio 60.  (A good show, by the way.)  Here’s my progress thus far:

 

The nice thing about knitting things that are to be felted is that they grow quickly, since they’re knit at a loose gauge on large needles.  It doesn’t bear thinking about, though, that after the expanse of stockinette, this bag ends with a double row of applied I-cord.  And then you knit separate I-cord handles.  We all know how I feel about I-cord.  We won’t go there again. 

Step away from the knitting needles and no one needs to get hurt. 

I’ve also been combing a new fleece.  It’s a gorgeous brown color, and it’s from a double-coated breed, although I don’t know which breed it is.  It’s also really dirty and has lots of vegetable matter (vm) in it.

 

Here’s a closeup:

 

The great thing about the 5-pitch combs is that they take out all that dirt and vm and all you’re left with is beautiful fiber to spin.

 

I’m pulling out the guard hair (the longer, coarser coat of the two) as a separate roving, or at least as much of it as humanly possible.  Then I pull the shorter undercoat into another roving.  The guard hair roving is on the left in the picture above, with the undercoat on the right.  You can get a little bit of an idea of how different these two fibers are from the photo, but to get a true idea you have to feel them.  The guard hair is so much coarser than the undercoat, it’s amazing that they come from the same fleece.

I don’t have any notion at this point of how I’m going to spin this fiber.  Right now I’m just enjoying the process.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 15th, 2006 at 9:41 pm and is filed under Casting on, It's the process. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.