Better Late than Never

My spinning is still looking very much like it was last week -- I'm on bobbin #3 of 4 of my Corriedale singles:

I'm hoping to finish this one up tonight and get started on the final bobbin, which will be the one spun in the opposite direction (so it'll be extra twisty after plying).

The title of this post, however, doesn't refer to what's on the wheel so much as what might go on it next -- this fiber, which turned up Friday but which I didn't discover in the door until I left to go to yoga on Saturday morning.

This fiber is the last shipment of last year's Crown Mountain Farms fiber club, the surprise fiber, which should have arrived several months ago, but apparently there was a mill problem. In any case, it's here now, and it was kind of nice to get it so much later than I was expecting because in all honesty I forgot about it. So it's kind of like someone just sent me fiber out of the blue.

The mystery fiber ended up being Alpenschaf, if I'm reading Klaus's writing correctly; it's a fiber I've never even heard of, let alone spun. It feels very much like a Corriedale to me -- most definitely a medium wool, not too coarse but not super soft either. I haven't pulled it apart at all to see what the staple length is yet, but I'm in love with the colors. It's almost as if Klaus dyed this just for me, because (as I'm sure you know if you've been reading this blog long enough) I love blues. The camera and the light made this look like it has a little more contrast than it actually does; what looks like black in the photo is really more of a navy in real life. I'm excited to spin this up and mix all these blues together! But first things first -- and with that, I'm off to my wheel.