It was only a matter of time

...before I bought a sheep. The wooly part of one, anyway.  My roommate (modeling the tarp full of wool above) and I bought a beautiful Corriedale fleece at Black Sheep Gathering last month. The fleeces were pretty picked over by the time we got there on Sunday, but I'm really happy with the quality of the one we got. It got 6th place in the Corriedale category. I barely had to skirt it-- I just separated out the parts with more VM from the parts with less and didn't throw anything away.

Peanut supervised the process. Her fur coordinates with the fleece so well.

 I washed and combed the first batch. It's really pleasant to take this:

To this:

To this:

The 2-ply sample is about fingering weight. A 3-ply or 4-ply would be a really nice sweater yarn, I think.

Also, my flax is so happy! It's actually shed the flowers and gone on to seedpods since this picture was taken. It's doing so well that I'm thinking of accidentally spilling a bag of flax seed all over the yard next year.