It’s official:

20 ounces of prepared roving takes me about 35 hours to spin into 1094 yards of three-ply yarn at a light worsted weight. Not bad, actually. I would have underestimated, but if you think about it, each one of those 1100-yard plies had to pass through my hands and then three of them had to be plied together to make the final yarn. That works out to about 120 yards an hour, or 2 yards per minute, which is really just about right when I’m spinning long draw.

I don’t think I’m likely to continue tallying hours spent on spinning, but it’s been very interesting to see just how long each step takes. And really, 35 hours to make a sweater’s worth of wool isn’t bad at all. I’m curious to see how long it takes to knit. (I’m guessing it will be longer.)

It is perhaps a good thing that I feel that way about spinning, because I realized last night that I’d spoken too soon. When I went back into the archives to check for a breed on the second fleece, I noticed that it had originally been 6 lbs. I thought the bag had looked a little small when I took it out of the closet to start carding, but I dug around a bit and didn’t find any more, so chalked it up to storage in a small space and didn’t think much more of it.

When we were carding, I thought I remembered that I’d had a darker gray color, but again dismissed the thought. But then when I saw that the fleece had weighed 6 lbs, I was pretty sure there must be more around here somewhere. I went and weighed the fleece we’d carded, and it’s just about 3 lbs, which would mean I’d lost 3 lbs in the washing. Even for a dirty fleece that would be a lot, and this was not a dirty fleece.

So last night I went stash diving to see just where that extra fleece might have got to. There really aren’t that many places for a bag of wool to hide in this house, and certainly not one of any size. But there is one deep shelf at the top of my stash closet that I am too short to access easily. It’s one of those shelves where you toss (soft) things up there and hope they don’t bounce back, and it’s where I have been storing the fleeces. I had checked back there, but if there was anywhere that a bag of wool could be, that would be the place. So I got a chair and poked around, and sure enough, there was another bag of wool, tucked away in a corner behind the fleece from Rhinebeck (which is now looking very lonely on that big shelf all by itself).

The remaining fleece is about 20 oz, and it was separated into three smaller bags: two are completely unprocessed, one is already hand carded, and one was full of that beautiful dark gray that I was sure I remembered seeing in this fleece. Apparently we’re not done with carding after all, but at least I found it before we returned the carder!