Going Batt-y

I've been watching the Gritty Knits group pretty closely on Ravelry because I'm the moderator and all the amazing batts people have been making are so inspiring that yesterday when I was over at a friends' house. (A friend who has a drum carder, she's a great friend to have. Hah!)
I dragged along some fiber to be carded into some lovely batts.

Earlier this year I attended a sheep shearing day at a friends' farm and came home with two lovely little Shetland fleeces. I only washed one but it turned out so lovely, if a little bit full of VM. Shetland is like that. They like to roll around in hay and such. Anyway, I separated this lovely little fleece into baggies based on color and hand carded a little of it but mostly just ignored it. Until yesterday. I dragged all of the baggies out and stuck them in my bag and headed over to this lovely friend's house.


This is the result of my work over there. I call them Surprise Batts because they have a little bit of a surprise. I made one normal batt then carded up a batt for her of some Blue BFL waiting around. Then, without cleaning off the carder, I started up with the Shetland again. That means, there's little bits of blue in this lovely grey and I added some Purple Flash Angelina so I ended up with something that looks completely normal and ordinary from the outside but very interesting if you look closer. I made 2 two-ounce batts so I'm greatly looking forward to spinning it up into some wonderful two-ply sock yarn. I just need to clean off a couple of bobbins first.

I may not be an "official" member of that group but I did share these lovely batts with them so they could see what I was inspired to do.

Well, now I'm off to keep knitting on my Camp Loopy Project. I have one sock finished and the second on the needles. I think I should have plenty of time to finish them, well, as long as I keep working on them.