Ever wonder what volume of unspun wool it takes to spin 200 g of yarn? I wondered--so I decided to check it out. I weighed one of my finished skeins of homespun, then started carding the washed Tunis fleece I've been spinning from and piled up rolags on the scale...and more rolags...and more... (a rolag being a soft tube of wool, the product of brushing a lock of washed or unwashed fleece with wooden "cards" set with bent metal teeth--something like dog brushes--until the fibers are straightened out, then rolling it up).

Unfortunately, it was hard piling even half that amount on the styrofoam carry-out box which I eventually substituted for the little plastic tray on my kitchen scale. This is 100 g of carded rolags:

One rolag is roughly 4 g of wool. They can't all be the same size, though, because if they were, that 100 g of wool would have 25 rolags in it. It actually has 28.

I will need 2 of these mountains of rolags to fill my spinning-wheel bobbin once.

So now you know!