Natural Wools

I think I might've mentioned a few times how much I love natural wool, animal fibres and embellishment fibres :) I made a couple of natural felt pieces recently. This first one uses lots of different breeds of wool inlcuding Finnish wool, Gotland, Shetland, Merino, Chubut, Mongolian, Russian, French, Welsh, Irish wools and Portuguese Merino. Plus quite a variety of wool locks and embellishment fibres such as hemp, flax, ramie, bamboo, silk and cotton.

This is a close up:

And this next one is even closer, the boucle yarn is mohair my friend Marilyn sent me and she also sent me the thick and thin yarn. The gorgeous reddish brown wool was from wollknoll, listed as 'Russian Camel'. I think it's camel coloured Romanov, nowhere near soft enough to be actual camel, and probably 8 times cheaper, thinking about it! The little nepps are cotton nepps.

I love the way the black bamboo top has rippled on the Chubut here, near the top of the photo:

And this is a closer pic of the Bluefaced Leicester curls at the top of the Chubut in the previous photo:

From one extreme to the other, this next piece uses just Gotland, or Gotland cross wool. It's about 1 foot by 2 feet (30cm x 60cm). For the bottom layer I used commercial Gotland tops, the second layer was commercially scoured Gotland fleece which I carded, and the top layer is all raw Gotland locks, most of which I got from my friend Zara not so long ago, with the odd few from my old stash. I'm not going to cheat and enter this in the 4th quarter monochrome challenge on The Felting and Fiber Studio :)

You can never have enough different breeds of wool, I think, so when I saw some being offered in a UK spinners group on Facebook I just couldn't resist. I told the seller, Wendy, that I loved locks and nice colours and let her choose what to send me, which is a good thing because I'd originally said I had enough alpaca. I didn't have any like this though:

They were all gorgeous, and I made an album on Flickr if you want to drool, this was another particularly nice one, Mule sheep:

I'm sure I'll be giving them all a try before too long!