I’ve been quietly spinning away on the gray fleece from Jefferson Sheep and Wool for several months now. It hasn’t been moving very quickly, but it’s been progressing. It doesn’t get much blog face time because, well, it’s gray wool. I love it and it’s beautiful and it makes a great yarn, but there’s really not much else to say about it. One skein looks about the same as three skeins, which look about the same as 9.


With no knitting in the works, the spinning has gotten a lot more attention this week. As I’ve gotten closer to the end of the gray fleece, I’ve begun to realize that I’m getting more yardage than I would have expected from the weight alone. This is a gently-processed roving, and so it has a lot more air in it than a commercial top.

I originally bought the fleece for me, but it just so happens that the sheep is named MacGyver, and I know a particular engineer who would dearly love to have a MacGyver sweater. When I hit 1000 yards, I thought that I might just squeeze out enough to make a sweater for Branden instead.

Last weekend, we tallied up the current yardage, what was left on the bobbins, and made some educated guesses about how much we could expect to get from the bag.

And it’s not quite enough. It is very, very close, but it is not enough.

And so, I started exploring ways to get around that niggling problem of not enough yarn. The sweater can’t get any smaller. The yarn shouldn’t be knit any looser. Lace is not an option. But what about a blend?

When I went to Jefferson, I bought one roving for me and two rovings for Branden. His rovings were huge, and I am sure to have more than I need from them. Of course, neither of those sheep are a MacGyver. But one of them is a dark brown that matches quite nicely with the gray.

I spun a few samples. We liked the outcome. So I spun a few skeins. I thought about a sweater design that would use all of them, fading from gray into dark brown with mixed skeins in between.

And now, instead of being a couple of bobbins away from done with MacGyver, I’m spinning another 2/3 of a sweater in two-tone and solid brown. It’s a lot more Shetland to spin, but there will be plenty of MacGyver left over.