This week has been all about new fibers. I’ve just placed my biggest order ever (32 lbs!) of fiber for show dyeing, and I’ll most likely be adding another 18 lbs over the next couple of weeks.

I mentioned the other day that I had received some beautiful Targhee in the mail for testing. I always want to see and spin a fiber before deciding whether it will go into the shop. I’ve had very good luck buying online, but there have been a few times that the quality just hasn’t been there. I’m excited about the Targhee, though, so I was really hoping that it would work out.

I haven’t managed to actually sit down and start spinning it yet, but I think it’s pretty safe to say that it will. I think it might be pretty safe to say that I am head over heels in love with it. Sometimes I feel like I have too many “favorites.” Every new fiber I try lately seems to become a favorite for the shop. Every new color is really hard to resist. I generally take that as a good sign, and I can’t imagine making something that I didn’t love, but sometimes it feels like there are an awful lot of favorites vying for my attention. (But then, there are worse problems to have.)

I dyed up the pound of Targhee, some Shetland, and some BFL over the weekend. And yes, I have some new favorites.

That will get a proper post all of its own in due time (soon!), but we’ve been having photo troubles again. I think it’s all this winter darkness; makes it hard to get good light.

I dyed these on Friday night so that I could wash them on Saturday and they would be dry by Sunday so that I could start test spinning some of the Targhee. I’m more than a little impatient to try it (the bounce! the soft!), but we keep our house fairly cool in the winter, and the basement is unheated, so it took forever to dry. We took our first batch of photos on Sunday night, but it was still far too damp to spin.

Yesterday, I had work to do during the day, and then I was out at knitting last night. Today was also full of writing and data crunching, but I was running out of brain cells anyway, and so have decided to take an afternoon break for fiber.

I had a hard time picking just one of the rovings to spin, but I think this one is my favorite of the Targhees. It’s a close tie between this and one of the light blue-greens, but I’m more likely to wear dark colors, so I think I’m going with this one. The color is a combination of four different dyes; a green, a blue, and two reds that make a deeply saturated purple. One of the reds tends to clump up in solution, and so it gets stuck on the outer layer of the fiber when you pour on the dye solution. I generally do a pretty good job of massaging it in, but there are always areas where the dye is much more concentrated, and so you end up with some spots that have a lot of red in them. I can’t wait to spin it!

I also can’t wait to play with the contents of this box that showed up on my doorstep this afternoon:

Isn’t that adorable? That’s my box of Rambouillet from Great Wool. And the best part isn’t even the outside of the box (though that’s pretty hard to beat).

This is another fiber that I’m pretty sure is destined for the shop. I haven’t spun with any of it yet, but just from looking it is absolutely beautiful. It is more expensive than my other fiber bases, but it looks like it will be utterly worth it. I have heard a lot about Rambouillet, but I have not yet gotten around to trying it. It looks soft, and sproingy, and full of crimp. I know what I’ll be doing on my next dye day!