Cheese!

A few weeks ago I found the Nundle Woollen Mill through Google and had a look in their Spinners and Weavers section where I found something they were selling called "Cheeses", so I sent off an enquiry via their form which unfortunately didn't get answered so I sent them an email asking for details about these cheeses. This is what I got told:

Our cheeses are 23 micron Polwarth fibre (carded and separated in about 3mm widths)

So I put in an order, and at $25 for a kg I thought it'd be good to try out. Thursday there was a slip in my letterbox saying I had a parcel, which mum kindly picked up for me when she was downtown. Opening up the bag this is what was inside..

Four cheeses.
An individual cheese which weights roughly 350 grams or more. Altogether there's 1.3kgs!

The raw width of the Polwarth fibre and it's so lovely and soft!

Out of interest I got out one of my lovely Spindlemaker spindles and started spinning up some, however the 30g Tassie Blackwood/Wattle one seemed a bit too light so I got out my big 50g
Budgeroo/Blue Gum spindle and started spinning. Without the worry of having to draft it spins up quite quickly and last night I sat on my bed with the spindle over the edge of the bed spinning roughly a metre at a time.

This is the thickness it's spinning up at. I'm very happy with this wool and now I just need to work out what colours I want to dye it when I finish at least 100g of it.


In other spinning news I finished a batch of English Leicester fleece. I did about 120 grams and got over 220 metres of a real fine yarn (roughly 17 WPI), some of the fleece I washed but some still has the lanolin in it cause I started with washed fleece and went back to unwashed when I was comfortable with spinning on the fold.

The flicked fleece, with it's pale tips left in for effect.

A super macro shot of the yarn, due to camera settings the picture has a slight blue tone to it.

The EL in the sun
All skeined up.

This is going to get turned into a pair of Knucks minus the writing at the moment, they're in mum's "To Knit" pile which doesn't have a lot in it but lately it's been way too hot to knit!

I'll have to post again before I head off for Tocal, only 3 short weeks to go!