This is Silverton, our 5-6 year old male with beautiful gray/silver fleece
The raw fleece in a bag, after being skirted and sorted. It's a beautiful color, and surprisingly clean and VM-free.
Some of the locks after flick carding. Because the fleece was so clean and soft I decided not to wool comb it - it only seems to need some flick carding to open the locks before spinning. This is actually the first time I will have flick carded fiber before spinning.
A test single on the drop spindle. I went with my drop spindle over my wheel because I want to spin this as roughly fingering weight, and I have finer control with my drop spindle (whereas my Louet S10 is better for plying and doing bulkier weight yarns).
A test skein, unwashed -- 2-ply, roughly 16 wpi, which is at the low end of sport weight and just above fingering weight, so I roughly hit the gauge I wanted. It's a very soft yarn and cloudier than I thought it would be, which is actually quite nice.
A close-up of the unwashed test skein. You can really see the cloudiness of the yarn. I'm curious what this will look like after washing.
I decided to comb some of the wool with my St. Blaise combs to test it against the flick carded preparation. Here's a roving along with a singles in progress.
The two test skeins side by side. On the left is a skein spun from flick-carded locks; on the right is the skein spun from combed top.
Okay, it's blurry and I didn't feel like retaking it. You can't really tell but the swatch on the left is knit from the flick-carded skein, and the swatch on the right is the combed skein. I like the combed top fabric better, so I'm going with that.
