I heart wool

   I recently started selling off my stash of wool roving.  Before Lila was born, almost 4 years ago, I had just gotten a spinning wheel.  I was into spinning and I had an inordinate amount of roving made.  It was great because this local guy raised meat sheep and didn’t do anything with the wool.  He gave me a bag of fleeces that was about 8-10ft tall and about 5 ft in circumference. It was a lot of wool!  So, I took it to the local Fiber Festival that year and bargained with the processors- would they want to keep half as the processing fee?  So, we split it halvsies, I went to another festival nearby a few months later and picked up about 30 lbs of roving.  If you don’t know, roving is the product of “processing” (or cleaning and combing) the sheep fleece so that you have a nice easy fiber to spin. 

   So, back to the point, I had this crazy amount of roving that I had dreams of spinning, dying, knitting up, etc… Then, Lila was born.  I literally went at least a year without even *touching* my spinning wheel.  The roving has been in boxes since that time.  I don’t think I’ve even spun an ounce of it.  So, when a Facebook friend asked if anyone had white/tan roving, I knew just the girl.  I had been thinking about selling it for awhile, so I took the opportunity.  I rolled it into 8 oz balls and sold it by the pound.  A pound of wool is *a lot* of wool.   Think, a pound of feathers.  As I was rolling it up, I remembered how I really liked the feel of wool in my hands.  I keep thinking I’ll bring my wheel upstairs and spin a bit.  So far, I haven’t.  But, it’s got a lot to do with the fact that I’ve been focusing on my Christmas crafting.  But, I did get to play with the wool a little bit for one Christmas gift.  I also finally got to play with the dye that Renata gave me about the time I got the roving!  It was really simple to use and didn’t take long at all. 

I took pics of the process for you!  Don’t you feel special!? I saw that the same FB friend from above had made cute little felted balls and I thought, “Yes! That’s what I need to do!”  So, I took some of the roving, wound it into a little ball, slightly larger than I wanted the finished product to be.  Then, I took some wool that I dyed a pretty blue color and wound it around in a random way. 

 

   I then stuffed the balls into an old pair of tights.  This prevents them from sticking to each other and also from leaving a lot of fuzz in my washing machine.  Now, I through the tights into the washing machine with hot water and a tiny bit of detergent, turned it on high aggitation, and checked every few minutes. 

 

   The result was these cute little balls that will hopefully make a special little guy happy this Christmas.