sheep to scarf, part 2

A month ago I blogged about the first half of the Sheep to Scarf class I taught during the winter semester for our Monday Homeschool Classes group. I included descriptions of how, during the first half of the semester, we took a fleece fresh off a sheep, skirted it, washed it, carded it, and dyed it. Now it's time for me to show how we took that fleece all the way through a finished, wearable garment!

The next step in the process was to spin the wool. Spinning is putting a twist into the wool fibers to hold them together and provide strength, making a thread of yarn. For our class's spinning, we used a drop spindle.


Each child got their own spindle -- an Ashford Student Drop Spindle, to be precise, which is a basic top-whorled spindle (meaning that the whorl -- the weighted part of the spindle that lets it spin0-- is at the top). The kids learned to push the whorl along their thigh to get the spindle spinning. They learned to draft the wool into the spinning action -- letting out just a little wool at a time to make an even yarn -- and they learned how to wind the spun yarn onto their spindle. They each went home with the wool roving they dyed and their spindle to spin it up before the following week. A couple of eager students asked me for more roving after class (which I was more than happy to provide, given that my real motivation in teaching this class is to produce another generation of fiber addicts!).

During the week, while the kids were spinning up their yarn, I too was spinning yarn in the same colors. At the next class, we plied (twisted) the yarn that they made with a strand of the same-colored yarn that I made to make a 2-ply yarn. Plying makes the yarn stronger so that it can be knitted or crocheted. The kids all constructed their own wooden niddy-noddy (seen in this photo) to finish their yarn on -- the plied yarn is wound onto the niddy-noddy, then rinsed under water and allowed to hang and dry for a week -- this sets the twist (so the yarn doesn't come unravelled when you work with it) and "finishes" the yarn. Once the twist is set, you slip the yarn off the niddy-noddy and either twist it into a skein for storage, or roll into a ball for use in a project.

I had designed the class to be an 8 week long course, with 1 1/2 hours of class time per week. But you know what they say about best-laid plans. The class time I was given was 1 hour long for 6 weeks instead. Simple math will show you that meant instead of 12 hours of class time, we only had 6 - half the time I'd planned on! So we weren't actually able to get to crocheting instruction, as I had originally planned. (To make up for that, I am teaching a Beginner's Crochet class in the Spring Semester!) So I had to improvise. I dyed yarn to match the 3 yarn colors the kids made -- red/pink, purple, and orange -- and also used a natural-colored yarn that matched the natural-colored fleece we skirted and washed (but didn't have time to do anything else with -- I had been hoping to play around with over-dying with them). Then I used that yarn to work up a simple scarf for each child. (The good news about that is that after crocheting 16 scarves, I am definitely practiced up and ready to teach that crochet class!!)

So during the last class, the kids used their hand-made yarn to fringe their scarves. This worked out better than I could have ever dreamed -- even though each child started off with an identical scarf, they all turned out completely different depending on what that child then did with the fringing. Some kids wanted only their own hand-spun on their scarf, so it was fringed with just one color. (J was one of those, although he chose to fringe it along just one part of a long side rather than on the ends, with a funky tooth-brush looking result!) Some kids traded with others so that they had matching colors fringing each row. Most of the kids went beyond traditional scarf fringing and added fringes along one or both long sides, and some even put some fringing in the middle rows! The creativity was awesome!

I had a blast with the class, and bringing it to our homeschooling community was a great way to get my feet wet in offering children's fiber programming, which is something I want to pursue in a more commercial way in the future. But for now it was just fun messing around with it with "our" kids!