...the bargain fleece

You know that feeling you get at a fiber festival, when you find that deal you just can't pass up?

I love that feeling...except when it makes me buy things like this fleece.

This was originally a little over a pound of Babydoll Southdown fleece - in a yummy natural chocolate color. I washed it this summer with some easy to scour Jacob, and several pounds of alpaca fleece. I thought it was clean.

I have, after buying this fleece, read Babydoll Southdowns described as the VM magnet of sheep or alternatively, made of velcro. I believe it!

This is my picker after a SINGLE pass of washed fleece. After carefully picking out a couple ounces of fleece that was in fact clean. The wool is so dense I didn't actually scour it all the way thru, so much of the fleece was still full of hardened lanolin - and only felt very vaguely sticky after pulling apart by hand.

Speaking of pulling apart by hand - after noticing the amount of neps the picker was producing I tried hand teasing the locks carefully and discovered that the entire fleece is brittle. The only thing going for it at this point is that there's no bug damage - it's just very fragile wool that was barely over 2" in staple to begin with.

Like a bad book I couldn't put down, I just had to "finish" part of this fleece. With the exceptionally short staple and amount of neps, I used my hand cards to prepare just over an ounce of the picked fleece. Then managed to spin it into a bulky 2 ply.

The bright side of this, is that I only paid $3 plus tax for the entire fleece. So even if it's going in the compost pile this weekend, it was a relatively inexpensive, if painful lesson in bargain fiber shopping - and both cats have enjoyed the "pillow" for the past few days. The yarn would go in the compost pile too, but I decided to keep it for a fleece to yarn demonstration at local crocheting guild this month.