This is Henrietta - some roving from several years ago. She has a beautiful silky fleece for a Jacob and it always sells quickly. When I noticed this ball had started to felt down into itself (it seems the silkier/looser crimped fleeces like hers and the longwools tend to do that if you're not careful...and sometime when you are :-o) I used that as an excuse to stick the last ball into my stash.
All it needed was a little fluffing up and some pre-drafting and it was back to spinning like butter :-). Drafting is how you determine how thick or thin your yarn is going to be. It basically means pulling the combed/carded (brushed) out thinner. The fibers slip past each other and say the original roving is (just a random guess) 1000 hairs thick all side by side, you might thin it out until it's maybe 50 hairs thick.
It doesn't change the color. There's just more air and light showing through. It spins up looking like the darker gray. Of course, it would have been helpful to have shown that, but it didn't cross my mind until just now. I used to work for a man that always said "What a brain...", usually about one of his horses. I find it usually fits me just as well.
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