Shearing Time 2019 – Fiona

I discussed Fergus’ shearing in this previous post.  The second sheep that Mtn Man sheared was Fiona.

Fiona is a 3/4 Merino x 1/4 CVM, which are both fine wool breeds.  She is white and has a medium-fine, soft, short fleece with a lot of elasticity.  She has a medium amount of grease, less than an average Merino, which is nice.  Her fleece is really good for blending with other fibers and other fleece because the elasticity lends itself to helping “hold” other slick-er fibers together into yarn when they don’t hold together well on their own.  We often use her fleece for blending.  But this year her fleece is better than it has ever been, it looks to be her prime year.  It is longer, stronger, softer feel, and has more luster than it ever has.  So we will likely run it on it’s own this year.

Since she was not jacketed during the first half of her fleece growth it got terribly dirty and muddy.  That will all come out in the wash.

It did not have much VM in it at all, so skirting went very quickly.  This year, Fiona’s raw skirted fleece weighed 4.1 lbs.  Fergus’ fleece was much bigger to start with but because it was so dirty with VM his was only .3 lbs more than hers once skirted.  This is why jacketing is so important to us.  We lost a lot of Fergus’ fleece to VM this year.

I am really excited to see what type of wonderful yarn Mtn Man makes with Fiona’s fleece this year.  Like I said he likely wont blend it at all this time.  Last year he mixed it with some purple dyed bamboo fiber and made some Sport-weight yarn.  I sold some of the skeins and kept a few for myself but haven’t used them yet.  I am thinking cozy, thick, winter socks…

He also used some of Fiona’s fleece from last year to blend with Toffee’s fleece and silk to make a shimmery sport-weight yarn.

I still haven’t used those skeins either…I better get knitting because we are about to have a lot more yarn and I haven’t even used up last year’s yet!

We have one more shearing…Rose.  I will share about her fleece next.