Sheep Fleece & Felt

On holiday on the Isle Of Islay, back in August, I collected some sheep fleece from Finlaggan.....which is the site of where the Lords of The Isles had their headquarters.

I'm currently reading a book I got whilst on Islay, by Alistair Moffat called 'The Sea Kingdoms; The History of Celtic Britain & Ireland'. It's giving me a fantastic background on Welsh and Scots history.

The creative textiles course has begun again, and I'm 3 weeks into it. So taking on some of Christine's suggestions, I went and bought 2 metal toothed dog-brushes. They are a pretty good imitation carding combs!

And so have started to 'card' the fleece from Islay, using said dog-brushes! I've got quite a nice little pile so far, but there's a LOT of fleece left! It was lovely last Saturday, sitting in the hot sun in my garden, carding through the fleece. I did think though, it was a good job I wasn't doing it on piecework rates! I'd never make a living at it.

Funnily enough, I did once work in a wool factory, decades back, in the 1970's. Not in the carding shop though; I worked on the wool-spinning machines. Very noisy, and dust-full.

Saturday was quite a different experience from the wool-factory.