10. The Bluefaced Leicester
To my surprise, this morning I found in my Advent bag instead of a ready to spin roving, unprocessed wool locks. This wool was not washed, and selling raw wool is pretty much illegal in Germany.
Since I am not your average spinner, my house is equipped with a drum carder to comb such locks. I don't however own a picker so I had to manually tease the locks open. Doing this while both dogs are being angels made it a very pleasant task instead of it having the opposite effect. The fact that I have time to do it also adds to the experience (it is Saturday), it wouldn't have been the same on a working day, which brings me to the following plot twist: I will have to open all the other bags to avoid this kind of surprise during our holiday trip where I will take the spinning wheel but obviously not the carder.
Spread too wide, I shouldn't have used the entire drum carder surface:
Honestly I could have worked directly with this but I thought it might be useful to put it through the carder once more, on a narrower surface.
Bad news - this wool was very little compared to the others I got. I would never repeat the experience of carding this wool raw - it is very fine and forms little knots that are a pain to remove while spinning. The water was black after I washed it and the wool is indeed white, not grey as you can see it below:
