Here's a kicker for you . . . an Icelandic sheep fleece is going to set me back fifty bucks.  Plus, I have to buy carders.  That's another $60-80.  A spinning wheel will cost several hundred dollars.  Top that off with lessons and my total cost of a finished pair of mittens from a raw fleece will set me back about $800. 

No sane person would do this, right?  The other day, I found myself covered in manure, fuzz, lanolin and bits of hay.  I'm draining our already strained bank account and I'm probably going to end up with a pair of itchy mittens that one of my kids will loose on the school playground the first day it snows.  And then I find that the lamb fleece I'm washing is not long enough to be spun.  Chalk it up to a learning experience.  I now know how to wash fleece.

Carl Larsson - Little Girl at Spinning Wheel

Why am I still determined to see this project through?  It is a bit of the inherited stubborness?  Is it the historian in me?  I was actually dropped on my head as a child.  That would explain a lot.  A lot.

I eat steak.  It doesn't mean I would like to go out and shoot myself a cow, skin it, gut it, butcher it.  It's bad enough that when I want a pair of boot socks I grab a $20 skein of yarn and spend a week (or two) knitting a pair.  I can't count anymore the number of friends that wonder why I don't just run to the store and pick up a pack of socks for $10.

Why do we make cookies and cakes from scratch when we can buy a box and 'just add water'?

I have a bee in my bonnet to sheer the sheep and ride the fiber train all the way through to a finished product.  Actually, I'll just watch the sheering.  I'd like to think my great Icelandic amma is smiling down on me when she's probably laughing at me instead.