100 fiber geek things 2: Blue Faced Leicester Wool

It seems like every yarn store I go to wants to sell one BFL (or Blue-Faced Leicester). Maybe everyone is breeding them these days? I dunno. They do make beautiful, lovely yarn. There is also an article about them in one of the Jane Austen Knits magazines, which I have not read yet. It's on my TBR pile, but brains.

Anyway, things to know about BFL:

• It's suuuuuuper soft. Like, Herbal Essences commercial from the early '00s soft.
• It has very long fibers (3-6 inches)
• Having long fibers means, at least for me, lots of pre-drafting and/or spinning from the fold and/or potential gnashing of teeth in the beginner stage when I didn't realize I needed to do those things
• I made these things with it, which are really pretty and suuuper soft even though the yarn is a very "beginner yarn"
• Judging from both the Fleece and Fiber Sourcebook (highly recommend the book, btw) and commercially dyed yarns I have seen, it dyes well.
• Overall review: really really nice fiber, possibly available too much at the expense of other fibers, not so great if you're a beginner because it can be kind of frustrating. However, you can still make all the pretty things once you get the hang of it.

Oh, and this is what the sheep itself looks like.


A ewe and her lambs in a garden, white long locks, courtesy of Wikipedia

It originated - you guessed it - from Leicestershire and early Mendellian-inspired breeding programs in the 1720s led in part by Robert Bakewell. The first breed was the Bakewell Dishley Leicester, which died out not long after its breeder at the end of the 1700s. However, all of the Leicester longwool sheep breeds (i.e. BFL, Border Leicester, etc.) trace ancestry back to these early Bakewell Mendellian breeding experiments.