IT'S HERE!

No, not spring. Or daylight savings (although we know that's here because we were an hour late arriving to pick up hay Sunday morning).

Our wool picker arrived today!  We have been wanting one for so long and researching them carefully.  We finally made our decision and ordered a beautiful Fancy Kitty bench picker.  What is a wool picker, you ask?  It is a really dangerous-looking tool that combs fleece.  There are over 350 steel nails divided between the base and a movable sled that you manually slide over the base.  The nail heads overlap a little, grab the wool, and loosen the fiber.  Any vegetation in the wool falls out during the process.  Here is a close-up.  Yikes...

As soon as we got home from ballet and saw the box, we opened it.  After one look at those sharp nails, Anna decided that I should do the wool picking. However, she couldn't resist something having to do with wool and the fiber arts for very long, so she finally tried it and ran some of Miss Fudge's washed fleece through the picker.  

After a little bit of practice, Anna was loving it.  The first pass or two takes some effort to slide the sled over the top, but the nails are angled so that as you keep working it back and forth, the fibers get fluffed and moved to the end of the box. 

Here is Anna weighing the results of her labor.  She is a true business woman.

All that fluff only weighed 1/2 oz!  Back to the picker, Anna!

Mimi's sweat shop is back in business!  We'll be spending a lot of time picking wool with our Fancy Kitty over the next 2 months in preparation for the Web's Fleece Market on May 14.