We’ll be offering Soap Making II on May 17th and 31. This is a 2 part class with Soap Making I the pre-requisite. Some of the topics covered are: Hot processing, Layering, Marbelizing and Milk-Based soap. You will need goggles, rubber gloves, an old long-sleeved shirt, approximately 12”x12”x12” cardboard box and some old towels. This is a fun class with so much information! Hope you can join us. This is only the 2nd time that this class has been offered, so please register early. $30.00 non-refundable class fee will register you and save your place in the class. A $20.00 material fee is due the day of the class.

We will not be offering any classes in June. This month will be hectic

Opal yarn continues to surprise us with their new lines. We’ll soon have “Inspiration” yarns in. There are 8 color combinations. Please stop by and check them out. Remember the skeins of yarn are only $12.00 each and you will get a generous pair of socks from each skein…or 3 average women’s socks. Of course, we still have the Brazil Collection along with Southwest. We have a few color combinations for Mexiko, Speckles and Masterpiece…Of the ones we have on hand, we’ll be closing them out at a SPECIAL PRICE of $10.00 a skein. Don’t miss out on this opportunity. I really don’t want to haul them to Black Sheep Gathering, so pick them up soon.

We’re expecting 2 new crias in the next few weeks! Yeah. Both will be a

An update on the dehairing processes… Needless to say, anyone that has had fiber processed since we put these new things in our line up knows that we are running a lot longer in turnaround time than we used to. Right now we’re about a month out for washing, carding and dehairing. With more experience, we’ve found out that we need to dehair according to fiber type…llama and alpaca or pygora and cashmere. So, if you bring your llama in while we’re dehairing cashmere or pygora, it will be a little while before we change over to the camelid fibers. I hope this helps in understanding our extended turnaround time. Also, our introductory price for the

Llama/Alpaca/Sheep wool--$10.00/#, incoming weight…there will be a 10% discount if your fiber only takes 1 time through the machine.

Pygora--$20.00/#, incoming weight…there will be a 10% discount if your fiber takes 1 or 2 passes through the machine.

Cashmere--$25.00/#, incoming weight…there will be a 10% discount if your fiber takes 1 or 2 passes through the machine.

Unless you let us know that you do not want the discarded fiber, we will send the waste from the dehairer back to you.

If you have more questions, please call or email us.
I’m washing fiber every day of the week. It’s been a very good thing as business has picked up quite a bit because of the washing. A lot of people are getting the efficient front loader washers and don’t have a way to wash their fiber short of washing it in the sink. Then there are the people

that just don’t want to wash the fiber. Not a problem. The cost of $3.00/#, incoming weight, just covers our costs of Eccoscour and heating the water, but does offer people an option we didn’t have before.

We will be closed May 8th through May 11th. Please make a note so you don’t need to pick up any fiber at this time. The large covered porch will still allow people to drop off fiber (if you park out front of the house and come through the backyard). Please be sure that you label each bag clearly with your name and what you want done with it along with your phone number and/or email. Thanks.

It’s time for the “soap box” again. I need to go a little further on the fiber preparation. When washing, do not let the water cool down before rinsing. This is especially important with sheep wool. When the water cools down, the grease/lanolin settles back on the wool…not good. Our equipment requires the fleece to be grease free to process properly. The next thing is the detergent/soap you use. We only use Eccoscour for our fiber washing. In the past I have used Dawn dish detergent and Tide liquid laundry detergent. Both are okay. The reason we changed is that Eccoscour is made to clean fleece,

does it well and is ecologically sound. The trick to all this is please rinse until the rinse water is clean/clear…and please don’t use shampoo or anything else with conditioners in it. They gum up the machinery and your fiber doesn’t look nice when it’s finished and you’d be surprised how different the color looks after it’s washed with the Eccoscour!!! Surprise, those fluffy critters our in your pasture that started out white are still white! Ha!

Well, once again I need to get this out to all of you. From now on we will be posting the newsletter to the website. Jim’s made this possible and I sure thank him for that. You can check back to the website about every 2 months…and hopefully I’m getting this done! Ha!

Take care & God bless.

Janell