For Love of Wool

One of the side effects of raising sheep and playing with fibers is that wool tends to become a decorative accent in your home whether you plan it or not. I have a beautiful basket of my natural colored yarns – creamy crystal, frost white, subtle, variegated oatmeal, light gray silver, medium gray smoke, dark gray charcoal, warm brown chai, dark gray brown chocolate, and my newest yarn, almost black coffee. Those are my yarn samples and I display them because I love the natural colors. In the entry way, we have another basket of yarns in blues and greens, because I love blue. In our bedroom, I have three large baskets of wool yarn and roving that doesn’t fit in my yarn dresser, the suitcases full of yarn piled decoratively in Laurel’s old bedroom or in the thirty odd plastic bins in the basement. Actually, that’s not fair, the bins in the basement are yarns to sell; the rest are my yarns to knit or crochet or weave.

Right now, I also have twenty bags of white fleece from 2011 in my entryway. I bring in a bag from the wool shed, skirt off the grungy bits, measure the fiber length, weigh it and set it in the pile to be spun into bulky yarn or the pile to be carded into batts for felting or mattress pads.

With all this wool in the house, Newton is in heaven. When he’s not sleeping, he’s snuffling for wool, enjoying either the tangy scent and flavor of lanolin and manure in the fleece, or the incredible mouth feel (I do not know this from personal experience!) of the clean, carded or spun fibers. If I can’t find Newton, chances are he’s head first in a fleece or a basket of wool, completely in love.