The scarf has been blocked and is drying overnight. The difference in appearance is amazing! Will try to remember to post a picture tomorrow.

Been washing some black CVM fleece. CVM stands for California Variegated Mutant, a really odd name for a breed of sheep if you ask me! The wool is fairly long stapled and fine and quite dark. I really, really like it, my sheep shearer friend hates it, which was why I didn't feel bad about choosing a good portion of that when she told me to select some wool to take home. I love this stuff....but then, I haven't spun it yet either. I was washing some of this wool, in net bags on the soak/spin cycle in the community washing machine. We have scheduled times, and it was my turn. The wool doesn't felt if you wash it this way, because it doesn't get agitated in that cycle. Agitation will cause it to felt into dreadlocks or doughnut shaped disks at the bottom of the washing machine! I typically have to run each batch of fiber through the soak/spin cycle three times in order to get it fairly clean, sometimes more....am guilty of erring on the side of caution and running it through again if there's any doubt as to whether it's clean enough... So I put the fleece in to soak, ran back to the house to get laundry for the other, fully functional machine and do a couple of things...and came back to find someone else's stuff in the washer and my wool was gone!! The dryer was running. Oh my god NO....yes. She did. One of the other residents put my beautiful fleece in the dryer, where it had flown out of the mesh bag and was flying all around in there. Egad. I got pretty upset with her...I hope it did not felt (put it back into the washer again after removing her stuff rather emphatically with much ranting). She is a single woman, I have 5 kids with me at least some of the time. We have the same number of laundry slots and yet she is constantly pulling my stuff out of the wash and using my time. Ugh! Not OK! I don't think she'll do it again...this week anyway.

If all the CVM fleece comes out OK, I should have enough of it to make a sweater. Meanwhile, am working on a large and complicated shawl using the blue wool yarn that I won as part of the door prize at the Post Falls Spin-In (fiber festival for handspinners). I love the color of this yarn, it is so pretty...and I really hate how it feels and handles. It's scratchy and unpleasant. Hopefully this is due to residual dye or whatever and will be resolved once the finished item is washed.

And...I'm currently reading this book. Ahem. Some of this is altogether too familiar.