Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue

Not as many brown song titles, I guess...

The synapses fired a bit, and I remembered where some of the mystery roving in my stash came from- a few years ago, I offered a trade of my knitting books for wool. I am pretty sure that's where the Louet Corriedale, and a lovely bag of Targhee roving came from. And this lovely wool- which came with a letter explaining the wool's origin.

This box is the fleece of Ebony- a Blue Faced Leicester/Border Leicester/Romney/Coopworth cross. The box (which had been opened but not explored since '05) had about 19ozs of beautiful lighter charcoal roving- prepared perfectly, and it spins like a dream. These 2 hanks total 5.1 ozs, and 286 yds of my usual fingering/sport 2-ply. The letter is signed Franna, and I think that must be Franna Pitt, who was on the Yahoogroups list with me. I don't have her e-mail address any more, so Franna, if you're out there- thank you again. Ebony will become part of my handspun sweater.

I'm also uploading a shot of the 3 browns I'll be using as base colors in the sweater. The darkest is a prize winning Romney lamb from Iron Creek Ranch, the medium is the Romney I spun last week, and the lightest is Ebony. They go together very nicely, and it'll be lovely for the browns to gradually lighten in the background on the sweater. (Ebony's yarn looks gray in the pic, but it really is brown, and you can tell when you put it next to the silver Romney- no comparison pic at the moment. I'll get on that).

And though my wool room is stuffed full (to the point that I am still discovering roving I forgot I had), I did buy some roving on eBay- these 2 bags are from Jehovah Jireh farm (seller id: jehovajirehfarm). Each is 8 ozs, the solid is Cinnamon Stick (40% Alpaca, 20% Corriedale, 40% Tunis), and the striped is Autumn Splendor (30% Alpaca, 30% Corriedale, 40% Tunis). I think I might try to spin some of the Autumn Splendor as self- striping by dividing the colors in the roving in equal amounts, and then plying with the Cinnamon Stick. I envision a Trekking Sock Yarn effect- sort of regular tweedy color changes. I'm going to spin at least another couple of skeins of Ebony before I try the new rovings.