Tunis wool roving

Monday, December 31, 2007

In addition to cooking, my primary leisure activities are knitting and spinning yarn, so, when I heard a few weeks ago that Farm to City had started listing Tunis wool roving from a local farm, I was quite curious.  Farm to City contacted me, and we arranged for them to deliver a sample for me to try.  It took me a couple of weeks to get to it, what with the holidays and all, but I sat down at my spinning wheel this weekend to play with local wool.  First of all, it’s very soft.  It’s wool from the first shearing of these lambs, and the roving is nowhere near as compacted as most commercial rovings.  It does contain more vegetable matter than I’m used to seeing, but it’s astonishingly soft for bits of grass.  Upon spinning it, I noticed that it’s a bit neppy (there are shorter fibers left in that will tend to form round inclusions in the yarn), but it would probably be great for felting with and was a good reminder to try to make the yarn fluffier.  It’s not ideal for my preferred spinning (tightly spun laceweight), but it’s great to see more local fibers available, and it is quite soft.

The roving is from Lindenhof Farm, in Kirkwood, PA, processed at Ohio Valley Natural Fibers, and it’s available in 8-oz batches.