Your Felt Purse Is Made Out Of What?!

So my sister Sarah has a cute Standard Poodle named Benny who needs to go to a groomer periodically to get shaved.

At one get together at my parents I pet him and my love of fiber kicked in (much like it does when I pull a ton of dryer lint out of the dryer screen) and I wondered to myself, I wonder how hard it would be to spin poodle fur. (Yes, I did think this through.) So when Benny started to get a little shaggy I proposed to my brother-in-law, Wayne, and my sister, Sarah, that they give me the clippings from Benny's next grooming. They checked to see if I was serious and low and behold the next time I saw them at Easter they brought me a grocery bag of Benny clippings. Yeah!

I happily washed it like I would sheep's wool in the washer, carded it with my hand cards, and spun up a nice worsted weight yarn on my spinning wheel. I only had so much and I wanted to be able to make something with it so instead of plying it back on itself like you usually do with standard yarn I plyed it with some multi-colored red silk thread. (To ply means you spin the yarn in the opposite direction you created it in and respin it with a second or more piece of yarn or other fiber.) I searched on the internet for a bag pattern that would be worthy of Sarah(thinking that would be small enough to accomodate the small amount of yarn I had) and found a cute little felted purse. I adjusted the pattern to fit my yarn and knitted up the bag in a day. I followed the easy directions to felt the knitted bag and man it came out awesome! I totally need one for myself now! I sewed little glass beads to the front and back and sewed in two bamboo handles. The handles were supposed to be straight but I was unable to find straight sitck bamboo and had to resort to oval shapped ones that had to be tucked inside to get the bag to keep most of it's square shape and not pucker.
It spun like wool and felted really nicely. What a great fiber to spin with, albeit lumpy (because of the way it was cut I think). The felting made a lot of the red silk thread dissapear but I liked that when you looked at it closely you could see red flecks like sparkels through it. And I liked how the fur regained a lot of the curl that it had lost in spinning. As a yarn it looked like it had the ability to plumb up nicely and it sure didn't let me down. It even had cute tiny cowlicks in a couple places. I'm very proud of this project. It was lots of fun. And Sarah and Wayne, not to mention my whole family, got a huge kick out of it.
In case you are wondering, however, I did turn down the offer for more Benny fur. I have such a multitude of projects going on right now, who knows when I would be able to get to it. Benny will continue to need grooming and I know where he lives.