So, March 2011 and I had a big box of fleece. An exceedingly big box for a newish spinner! The obvious thing was to share it round my spinning friends.
I sent some to Barbro in Finland and she used her skills and experience to spin the different types of Boreray fibres and wrote a fascinating blog post about it.
Wonderwool Wales was coming up and every year Amber and her Ravelry helpers organise a Raverly activities area where Ravelry members can meet friends and money can be raised for Air Ambulance. I decided that a great way to share round the Boreray fleece & raise money for Air Ambulance would be to have bags of the fibre for people to take in return for a donation.
I skirted the fleeces and sorted the unfelted & cleanish parts of the raw fleece into 100g bags in 3 categories: Fine & Surprisingly Soft, With Character & Kemp, Robust Character
Keeping back some mixed fleece for myself, we had 22 bags which proved very popular.
I then swapped some of this fleece with Marjorie in return for a carding lesson at Stanhope Spinning Group. This was an incredibly fortuitous thing to do since Marjorie is a very good weaver as well as a spinner and she spun and wove a Boreray scarf!
This is the spun yarn, together with some that Marjorie dyed using lichens.
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At British Wool Weekend in Harrogate in September 2011, Marjorie brought her scarf to show Sue Blacker of the Natural Fibre Company
At the end of September 2011 I was at Masham Sheep Fair and Freyalyn brought along the yarn she'd spun from one of the Wonderwool Wales' bags of Boreray - rather more impressive than my efforts!
I was flicking through this, and looking at the last photo wondered who else had this particular combination of wristbands. Then I realised no-one had!
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