I recently brought home three new fleeces from the New Jersey Sheep & Wool Festival, and I’ve started working with one of the more unusual ones.

This fleece is a Jacob cross, so beneath all of that dirty orange and cream there are areas of both white and black wool. Right now it looks rather wild — coarse, dry, curly and definitely not a fleece I would have chosen for something worn against the skin.

I probably wouldn’t choose it to spin, either.

But that is exactly what interested me.

The curls are wonderful, the color variations are unpredictable, and I keep wondering what will happen once it is felted and washed. Some of what appears orange now may turn out to be white or beige once all that farm dirt is gone.

So instead of asking this fleece to become yarn, I’m letting it become something else.

A handbag, perhaps.

That is one of the things I love about working directly with raw fleece. Each one has its own character, and part of my work is figuring out what that particular wool wants to become.

This one is still very much an experiment.

We’ll see where it goes.

Watch the studio video below to see the fleece before felting and hear me talk through what I’m noticing as I work with it.