Another fleece donated by Happy Chick Farm hit the tub in Merrily’s backyard.

Merrily and Lynda separated out the darker coloured fleece and washed it separately.

All hanging to dry now.

A few days later, the fibrehoodies gathered at Dorothy’s to pick and card, pick and card.  Andrew and Lynda are putting the recently washed Happy Chick Farm fleece through the Patrick Green picker which opens up the fleece in preparation for carding and also removes some vegetable matter.

You can see why it’s important to wear heavy leather gloves when using the picker.

Dorothy and Heather work on putting a grey fleece through the electric carder.

Dorothy holds a soft brush over the rotating drum to smooth the fleece and improve the resulting batt.  Our next mill addition will be a burnishing tool which will do this more efficiently.

After the wool goes through once, the batt is put through a second time which removes more vegetable matter and results in a softer batt with better aligned fibres.  Merrily is wearing the batt around her neck while Heather feeds it into the carder for a second carding.

After everything has been processed, Dorothy and Merrily weigh the batts to make 4 ounce bags.

Then there was clean up with happy fleece flying everywhere in Dorothy’s yard, happy batts ready for spinning and happy hoodies, satisfied after a fibre fun day.

And finally, here are the bags, labelled and ready to be handed out to spinners to spin for the Sunshine Coast Spinners and Weavers Guild’s ANWG 2017 Blanket Project.

The next day at the Guild’s southern spin-in, it was on to the next step for our blanket project.  Here Lynda gives the first bag all ready to spin to Deanna Pilling, founder of our Sunshine Coast Fibreshed.

Heather Apple, Merrily Corder, Lynda Daniells