What is a longwool?
Some of the best known longwool sheep breeds are Blue-Faced Leicester, Wensleydale, Border Leicester, Masham, and Romney, and there are many more. Longwool fibers have an average staple length of 4-10 inches, and their fiber has a weighty hand and lustrous sheen.

Left to right: Border Leicester, English Leicester, Perendale, Lincoln, Romney, Blue Faced Leicester

Lots of people say the longwool breeds are only good for rugs. Well, I disagree. Longwools are great for both outerwear and lace. Shawls are my favorite type of outerwear and are almost always worn over another article of clothing. Longwool yarns are fantastic for lace knitting. They create yarn with lovely drape, crisp stitch definition and gorgeous shine. With this in mind, we can start looking at the not-as-soft-as-merino wools in a different way.

What preparation to spin
Most mill processed longwools widely available are combed top unless you are buying from a source that has it specially processed in small batches. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Combed top will give a smoother yarn where the luster of these wool types will be able to shine through.

Top to bottom: Romney top, Blue Faced Leicester Top, Lincoln Top and Masham top

If processing the locks yourself, flicking or combing will both work very nicely but if the locks are extremely long – 5 inches or more – flicking may not be the best choice. It is difficult to do a good job flicking open the fibers along the entire length of the staple enough to draft smoothly.
When beginning to spin you may want to open the fibers up a bit by attenuating the fibers or by separating short lengths – 12 to 24 inches in length and giving them a snap like a whip from each end.  These methods will help the fibers move past each other more smoothly during drafting.

Drafting Methods
In spinning for lace I prefer a worsted short forward draw (sometimes called inchworm) keeping all twist in front of my forward hand. This will give you the smoothest yarn with the most opportunity for luster. Can you see a theme here?

That is my preference but if you want to have a lovely halo or added warmth, a woolen spinning method of spinning will be the best. If those are my goals I usually spin from the fold allowing the twist to be between my twist controlling hand and fiber hand.  Spinning from the fold will shorten those fibers and help ease the drafting.

If you are spinning on a wheel, light take up is always best. Longwools need less twist to hold together than some of the finer, shorter fibers. If you are struggling with overtwist and wiry yarn, try increasing your take-up and allowing your yarn to wind on a little faster. This will take a little experimentation to get the results you want, but you need to be sampling for your project anyway, right?

Twist
The amount of twist you add to the yarn for lace is a personal preference.  When making this decision it is very important to sample and swatch.

I made three samples and swatches using a commercially available Masham top.  All three were spun on the Schacht Matchless with a short forward draw of about one inch and all were spun with one draft per wheel rotation.  The only thing I changed was the whorl ratio.

When I plied them all were plied with the same plying twist so the only difference in the sample yarns is the twist in the singles.

Top to bottom: Low-, medium- and high-twist yarns

You can see what happened in the photos. The most softly spun yarn has a lovely halo and is very soft.  When I looked at this finished yarn, I was afraid it would be too soft for what I wanted, but when I knitted up the swatch I was pleasantly surprised at the outcome.

Left to right: Low, medium and high twist swatches

The medium-twist yarn is the one I liked best from the start and the swatch didn’t disappoint.
The high-twist yarn, I thought, would be too wiry and stiff for the lace I had in mind but when I knit it up I really liked it.  Though not as soft or drapy as the other two, I can see a very nice everyday shawl or shrug or sweater made from that yarn
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You truly don’t know what the yarn will do when knitted until you knit it.  It changes and transforms, almost always, into something wonderful and useful.

Finishing your yarn
When you’ve done your sampling spinning, there is one more important step before you swatch: finishing your yarn. Because longwools have a natural halo, I prefer not to thwack or beat my skeins when they are damp. I don’t want to bring out that halo too much before knitting. Bringing up the halo early, before knitting, plumps the yarn. I want the yarn to remain smooth and narrow to show off the lovely stitch definition of the pattern. I like the yarn to be as smooth as possible while knitting. This helps make any possible ripping back easier since those long, haloed fibers aren’t locking on to each other.

After the item is finished the halo will develop naturally with wearing and will become more and more beautiful over time.

Beth is a fiber shop owner by day collecting as many fleeces as she can before she dies.

By night she is the Longwools Avenger, righting all the wrongs and educating the masses on the uses of wools other than Merino and Blue Faced Leicester.