In June 2005, my little family visited Suzanne Correira’s Fire Ant Ranch in Elgin, Texas. I bought fleece and planned to unpack my spinning wheel and spin it all up. I missed spinning!
Okay, well. I did get out the spinning wheel and spun about half a bobbin of the green fleece with yellow, which you can see in the blog post I wrote at the time. So yay me!
It was a while before that pretty green and yellow yarn got finished. In November 2021, I set up my spinning wheel in its own dedicated corner in the house we built in the interim.
My goal now is to spin my backlog of fiber from friends and vendors in England, various wool festivals here and there, and friends in Comanche County, one who raises sheep and one who raises buffalo. This will take a few years.
I tend to get distracted (yes, like for 16 years—see above), so I chose three bags of fleece to start with. I promised myself not to move on to the next batch until those three bags were empty.
Mission accomplished! The fleece, roving, and mohair locks in the three bags are spun, and here’s what they look like. Hope you like the music!
@textilefusion #HandSpun ♬ The Twist – Chubby Checker
That was a lot of spinning, so the next goal was quicker, kind of a spinning palate cleanser.
- The yellow is Polwarth wool and silk from Sky Loom Weavers Farms, a freebie at the 2021 Texas Fleece and Fiber Fest.
- I got the coral mohair in England before 2003 from Victoria Smedley, known as Mo Bair.
- The hand-painted blue kid mohair was labeled La Plata Farms, Colorado, probably bought at the Wool Festival at Taos, and it was lovely to spin.
Now it’s time to spin the fleece from our 2005 visit to Fire Ant Ranch. Gulf Coast Native, Black Welch Mountain, and a Fire Ant Ranch special Rock Pile blend of Shetland and forest green mohair, along with a dark khaki fleece of some kind, and a bag of white roving, which may have been meant for making Christmas tree top angels.
The story about our visit to Suzanne and Fire Ant Ranch is in “Welcome to the Fire Ant Ranch,” INKnitters, pp. 42 ff., Vol. 5, No. 2, Fall 2005.