At the end of last September, I washed a beautiful Shetland ewe fleece. It is from Willow Farm, and was my first (run-don’t-walk) purchase at the 2018 Woodstock Fleece Festival.

Melly cat approves of my initiative and inches closer.
Willow Farm is a great spinner’s flock. After the joys of working with Shepherdess Jocelyn’s Romney ram fleece 10 years ago, I also loved an Icelandic ewe’s raw wool. They do also carry mill-prep but these are lovely fleeces too.

We like the drying part too
Taking a break: hand cards
This week I was able to admit something to myself. The other fibre prep in progress was actually not. With draining days, busy house, etc., I was not moving well on the Olde English Babydoll Southdown locks.
This project was last featured on TKK here. It was going along but in short bursts.

From Olivia’s Babydoll Southdown, January 2020
The devil is in the decision fatigue.
Flick locks ⇒ hand cards ⇒ rolags ⇒ bring out the antique wheel + spinning chair from a corner ⇒ spin happy ⇒ wind-off (repeat) ⇒ {major gap} ply; cable-ply.
Melvin saw the {major gap} part as magical. We had words (again), and I had to confess it was maybe too slow now at around 262 yards.

Sometimes Melvin makes a good point.
Lovely cabled yarn but that’s intense even for me.
Luckily, I had fairly recently given myself the gift of a new spinning space in the house. That’s key.

Elbow room if not blissfully quiet
The plus for everyone else is less spinning equipment in a room that we all use the most. More importantly, I am using the space!
Enter the pillowcase of Shetland locks
As the fog of What to Do in Ty’s quiet time lifted this Monday, I figured out a way to leverage new space + enjoy the Shetland fleece responsibly.

Aha! Meck peasant combs!
A plant stand is re-purposed for the oh so dusty peasant (Russian style paddle) combs by John A. Meck. There is not much VM, and I am not using the flicker at all.
Now, I can stop typing so much, and show the happy outcome of this week as it happened:

Comb charged twice = 4 lengths of Shetland top
A quick pivot to the Watson Martha spinning wheel, and then:

As short as quiet time and sweet
The 2-ply sample shows the variation of the prep & has bounce.

Sweet!
This seems like a good plan. With 4 lengths of top in each ply, yield is approx 39 yards.
Afterword on the last post
Shortly after pressing publish on Friday, I saw more about the Ravelry rebrand, site accessibility.
If you are farther behind these discussions, Ravelry designer @ktb38 has given her/their side of Cassidy’s now deleted tweet on Instagram, Twitter. I am not following closely but am engaged.
Secondly, the established searchable, open forum ‘For the Love of Ravelry’ listed in the FAQs as “the place to ask or comment about site information updates and spread love,” is now entirely (and tersely) closed to this topic. Users are directed to a private in-site email channel.

Hibiscus is thriving
The upshot for TKK is that I will aim to give more detail here as needed. Posts may get swamped again – in fact, they probably will – but an effort will be made to not assume the audience is able to access this user-driven resource.
If credit is due then until solutions are found, I will add content warnings for links, etc. going forward.