Just after the Estes Park Wool Market, I mentioned the Keep the Fleece contest that will be taking place in conjunction with the UN International Year of Natural Fibres in 2009. At the time, the web site wasn't live. It is now.
If you haven't seen Jean Luc Cornec's sheep made of recycled phones and phone cable, you have a treat waiting for you. The flock is in the Museum für Kommunikation, Frankfurt am Main.
Thanks to Carol for clueing me in. I see that Rebecca Blood, whose book on blogging got me into this practice (with the help of a big nudge from the ethnic knitting group on Yahoo), wants one, too.
Some people think all sheep look the same, which is kind of like thinking all dogs look the same, from chihuahuas to Great Danes. Some people think all wool is the same, and it's boring and it itches, which is kind of like thinking all bread is white and squishy and flavorless.
I've spent a large portion of my life utterly fascinated by the varieties of sheep and wool. I have no idea where this came from or why I find it so interesting that it's been one of the major constellations by which I guide my voyage through life, both vocationally and avocationally, but I don't argue with it. Anything that continually amazes is worth continuing to consider.
(Even for somebody who's mildly allergic to wool, some types of grasses, and molds, and definitely has a bad reaction to mothballs.)
For example, the disparate characters of locks of wool:
All wool is the same, right? I picked two whites, just to take the color factor out. Both breeds originated in the mountains and hills of Scotland (so did I, in part).
The one on the right is Scottish Blackface. That lock is 13 inches (33 cm) long and has a crisp feel to it.
The lock on the left is about 2.5 inches (65 mm) long and feels spongy. That word "spongy" is not quite right, although it's often used with reference to wool. It doesn't seem precise enough. I'm looking for alternatives and haven't found one yet. This wool doesn't have the "sink your face into it" quality of the very fine wools, yet it does have some nice give to it, unlike the Scottish Blackface ("crisp" does work for me).
By the way, I'm not identifying the breed of the lefthand lock, because that fleece isn't typical. It is good wool, freshly shorn, and works for my discussion: it just shouldn't represent its breed . . . it would have to be about twice as long to do that.
And oddly, the sheep that grow the shorter wool are about two-thirds the size of those that grow the long wool: the little guys grow the long wool, and the bigger guys grow the shorter stuff (which is much shorter than the Scottish Blackface even when it does meet the breed criteria).
Some locks of CVM (California Variegated Mutant) wool
Ellen at Sheepwreck has been pondering whether a particular CVM fleece is really a CVM (California Variegated Mutant), which is a Romeldale with a specific color configuration. (CVM is recognized as a separate breed from the Romeldale, because two CVMs, when mated, reliably produce CVM offpsring. The breeds are so close in most regards that it's like talking about twins, though.) She's noticed in particular the disorganized nature of her locks and the fact that the wool feels "crisper" than she expects. Sarah, in the comments, posted a link to some lovely and characteristic CVM from her own flock.
I have a few CVM and Romeldale bits around that I'll show for comparison purposes as well:
Those are CVMs across the top (two sheep, three locks and two locks respectively) and Romeldales along the bottom (three sheep, two locks each). The shorties (top row, darkest) are about 2.5 inches (6.5 cm) and the longies (bottom row, grayest) are about 4 inches (10 cm).
Here's an interesting photo of the locks from CVM fleece number 1:
Here's a close-up of the center lock, which gives good evidence of a nice, even crimp pattern:
And here's a close-up of the lock on the left, which is more like the one shown at Sheepwreck—the crimp is more vaguely evident in the lock, because the structure of the lock is more jumbled:
Here's a nice, very long, evenly crimpy Romeldale:
In person, it's prettier and the evenness of crimp along the fibers is more obvious than in a photo.
Breed standard
Here's the portion of the CVM breed standard that's pertinent to the current consideration:
The American Sheep Industry's breed directory gives a slightly different description:
Spinning counts or wool grades?
The various wool classing systems can be confusing. Here's what the chapter on wool from the American Sheep Industry Association's Sheep Production Handbook (2002 edition) has to say about spinning counts and wool grades:
So we can let go of any thoughts we have about the slight discrepancies in those numbers (two different systems using the same symbols).
Digression: We can also be glad that "[t]he practice of using wool grades . . . is declining on an international basis. It seems likely that [it] . . . will be wholly replaced by a measurement of diameter (in microns) and variability (standard deviation, also in microns)" (same source). Those of us who work with wool by hand will need to continue to train our fingers and our eyes, of course, because we're not likely to run around evaluating wool with analyzers that will give us on-the-spot micron counts (lovely tools, but not suitable for the average crafter's basket or budget).
On crimp
Another confusing factor here is that crimp is an attribute of the individual fiber, not the lock.
Crimp occurs because of the physical structure of a single fiber. To make a too-long story short enough to be useful, the main part of a wool fiber is the cortex, and it's composed of two types of cells (orthocortical and paracortical, if you want to get serious). These occur in different divisions and arrangements in different sheep. One cell type is found on the inside of the crimp curve, and the other is on the outside of the crimp curve. (This information also comes from the ASI handbook's wool chapter.)
The corker in this is that crimp can be easiest to see in a neatly organized lock with all the crimpy bumps in the individual fibers lined up together. So we may not immediately perceive the crimp situation in a disorganized lock, while it knocks us over the head in an orderly one.
I can't get a good-enough close-up of a single fiber in that disorganized lock of mine up there, but the individual fibers are evenly crimpy, from butt to tip.
As an aside, that Scottish Blackface lock up there has minimal crimp in the fiber. It does have a graceful wave in the lock. Because fibers are normally separated from each other in spinning, regardless of technique, the lock structure can be useful (even important) for preparation but has no effect on the qualities of the finished yarn. Crimp, on the other hand, has a lot of influence on the yarn.
What about all these CVM locks?
Reading through the breed standards, all of my samples meet the criteria. Yes, even the short one: that "3-6 inches" is an average. I just won't have the option of combing that particular batch of wool. It will definitely get carded (or spun from the locks, or flicked).
The "crisp feel" that Ellen mentions is harder to contemplate without immediate tactile access. Breed standards call for 60s to 62s quality (listed as "spinning count"), and the American Sheep Industry's information puts the wool between 58s and 62s (USDA wool grades). For comparison (in USDA wool grades), Rambouillet is 60s to 70s and, among the Down breeds, Southdown is 54s to 60s; the rest of the Down breeds run a little coarser than that, although there's overlap, of course.
Shifting to the micron count comparisons, we've already noted that CVM is in the range of 22 to 25 microns. The Rambouillet is 19 to 24 microns and the Southdown is 24 to 29 microns.
Rounding off numbers, since I'm going for general understanding, most of the fibers in a 58s-quality CVM would be between 25 and 26 microns, plus or minus 7 microns.* A fleece like that would definitely feel more like a Down wool than a fine wool, in line with Ellen's comments about the hand of the fiber she's pondering.
*A USDA wool grade of 58s has an average fiber diameter between 24.95 and 26.39 microns, with a standard deviation of 7.09 (same page of the ASI handbook).
Ellen's wool's light-colored, brittle tips are curious, given that the sheep was jacketed. Where her red flag went up at the appearance of the lock, mine goes up at the mention of the brittle tips that break off and cause neps. That brings up questions of when and how the jacketing was done; jacketing is not a magic, easy practice that automatically produces beautiful wool.
In sum
I think it's hard to really get a sense of what any fleece is like until I'm actually working with it. Pre-purchase evaluation can only go so far, within constraints of time, space, and wool-browsing etiquette.
Sometimes the trick is in figuring out how to make the best of what you've got once it reveals its full character. Even, sometimes, when that character involves neps . . . if you like the wool well enough in all other regards, which is the ultimate question.
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Note: Romeldale/CVM is listed as a rare breed with critical status by the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy.
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Copyright 2008 Deborah Robson
I got interested in rare-breed conservation when I realized that the animals that produced most of my favorite handspinning fibers were on the watchlists posted by organizations like the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy and the Rare Breeds Survival Trust.
That was a number of years ago. Because of the ongoing support of a number of people, some of those breeds are in much better shape now. Some are still very precarious. They all need our interest and help.
Here are some ideas and actions that can make a difference:
Okay, that's a lot. Just pick one thing to learn a little bit more about . . . or just pick up a skein of breed-specific yarn to play with, whether the breed is rare or not. Educate your fingers about what different wools feel like (although this isn't just about wools, of course; we've lost cottons, and we need to safeguard our flax quality, and . . . ). "Merino" and "100% wool" are just the entry points to an amazing universe of options. I've been engaged in this process for years. It's fascinating, and extremely rewarding.
A couple of books:
Have fun! And surprise yourself, as I just did in the discovery process of the most recent three posts.
I haven't had time yet to work out a way to take photos of my own hands while I'm spinning. I need some sort of extended shutter release that I can hit with my foot.
Meanwhile, we'll make do with what I can come up with, which is yarn photos with captions.
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Because I'd carded rolags, I was tempted to wonder (even against my better judgment) whether I might be able to spin the wool with a long draw, which emphasizes the woolen (as opposed to worsted) qualities in the yarn. I drew out a yard, even though I knew it wasn't going to work very well. This is what I got:
Ick, of course. Twist travels to the narrow spots in the yarn. When the fibers are in great shape and well prepared, you can draft out slubs without difficulty. However, when you're dealing with second cuts and other neps, they won't draft out. The twist travels to the narrow spots. It skips the neps completely, turning all the nep-regions into weak spots that break. You get ugly, fragmented yarn (and a lot of frustration).
On to the short draw, which gives more direct control over each segment of yarn:
There are still bumps at some of the neps (1) and thinner spots that collect twist (2), but it's possible to elongate the neps, making them slimmer and securing them more effectively in the yarn (to the left of 1 and between 1 and 2). It's a drastically better yarn: more even and far sturdier.
While spinning, I remove any second cuts or other bits that will leave with one quick plucking motion. I get rid of some of the vegetable matter (VM) by pinching the new yarn quickly between my fingernails and stroking firmly toward the orifice of the wheel. That movement sometimes snaps off the ends of a piece of plant on both sides of the strand and they drop away. Another quick scrub of the nails down the yarn and the remaining middle bit of VM falls out of the forming yarn. I don't do more of this than I can easily accomplish while keeping the rhythm of the spinning going. I spin a relatively slender singles with a fairly high amount of twist because the fibers are only 1.5 to 1.75 inches (38 to 45 mm) long and are quite fine.
Two-plied, fresh off the bobbin, here's what my small skein looks like:
Even with the irregular twist caused by the neps, the skein as a whole is balanced.
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Using an old Weave-It loom (the new version is a Weavette), I made a quick square just to play with the behavior of a fabric made of this yarn.
Then I got my skein wet to finish the yarn. I usually don't weight my skeins, but this one looked like it wanted to dry under just a bit of tension. I balanced a half-full shampoo bottle against the side of the shower; some time during the night the bottle fell into the tub, but it had already done its minimal amount of work by then.
Here's the finished skein:
That crinkled spot in the skein is from the too-sharp bend it took around the hook on the shower caddy. Take a look at my little woven square: I rubbed it for between 20 and 30 seconds in the warm water with the detergent and it started to full up nicely.
The yarn I spun isn't even and regular. I knew from the beginning it wouldn't be. It couldn't possibly be, because of the condition of the fleece. But it is quite pleasing:
If I knitted or wove it into a fabric, it would be pretty and comfortable and it would wear well. (Yes, it would dye nicely, too, if I wanted a color other than white.)
My daughter can't wear most wools . . . or even many luxury fibers . . . next to her skin. She finds them scratchy. She has a far lower "itch factor" threshold than most people. She can handle baby alpaca and qiviut (ha; she does not have a baby alpaca or qiviut sweater). Even most Merino doesn't work for her; the finest Merinos probably would, although she hasn't encountered one of them yet. She'd probably do fine with cashmere.
I handed her the small washed swatch of rare-breed wool and she felt it with her fingers and then lifted it to her cheek as her eyes grew wide.
"This is really soft," she said, rubbing it against her face. "I could wear this!" She looked more closely. "It has a nice shine to it, too."
Later, as I sit here writing these comments, I bury my nose in the skein. It smells sweet and clean, and ever-so-slightly like spring, and a whole lot like hope.
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These posts have described one way to deal with an imperfect fleece, and that final small skein is a heck of a good reason for doing so. Although it's nowhere near as nice as the specific yarn I remember from the Save the Sheep contest, it's recognizably a close relative. And it's a long, long way from where I started.
The completed yarn has a lot of character. It's unique, and it's got a whiff of magic to it.
By the way, the wool is from one of the few remaining Santa Cruz sheep—a three-year-old ram. He's a miracle, and I think my wonderful, slightly irregular, yarn is a tribute to his survival and a personal argument in favor of his breed's continued existence.
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Tomorrow: A few ways to help save rare breeds and species that produce irreplaceable fibers
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Once the grease and most of the dirt are out of the way, I can get a better look at what I'm dealing with. The biggest problem in this fleece is not its length (very short, 1.5 to 1.75 inches, or 38 to 45mm) but the second cuts and other neppy bits.
The red Xs show discrete bits of short fiber, mostly second cuts, that can be pulled out. Not easily pulled out, because this wool is fine enough that every fiber grabs onto its neighbors and tangles up with them. On a coarser wool, the second cuts often stay discrete and just drop, or can be brushed, off. The purple X is smaller but presents a bigger problem. It's short fiber but a tiny bit and ill-defined, it's hard to see within the fiber mass and even harder to remove: it also snarls with all the adjacent fibers, and it truly doesn't want to leave. It will make a bump in the finished yarn . . . not a large bump, but also not an avoidable bump. (Note also the tiny scattering of debris that has fallen out of the sample as I picked the wool apart . . . it's quite evident in the lower right corner of the photo. After five washes and three rinses, there's still "stuff" in the wool. I figure it's clean "stuff" by now, though.)
The whole fleece looks like the sample above. If I try to get all the stray bits out, I'll go nuts and I won't have much wool left to spin. If I try to pull loose the neps, I'll also scrumble up the relatively clear parts of the locks, creating problem areas that don't exist now.
It's time for a zen approach to these neps. I won't ignore them completely—the short bits don't help either appearance or durability, and not making at least an attempt to get them out is against my nature—but I'm only going to pay attention to the obvious ones.
Now it's time to pick a preparation tool. The wool needs preparation. I would like to see exactly how much regularity I can coax out of this fleece. I want to show it at its best, whatever I think that is.
Spinning from the lock isn't an option; the locks aren't well enough defined. Simply picking and spinning won't minimize the effect of the neps. The wool is too short for any type of combs, and the locks aren't clear enough for that approach anyway. Flicking's out of the question . . . again, flicking wants locks.
So I turn to carders.
I've been at this long enough that I have a variety to choose from.
The neps will probably snag in the teeth of the fine ("cotton") carders, which I normally use for fibers as delicate as this wool. I'd feel like I was fighting to get the work done.
I think the new "wool" carders will be too harsh for what feels, under all the weight of grunge that it's carried, like a fairly delicate batch of fiber.
I'll use my old favorites: they win on account of their relatively fine teeth and pronounced flexibility. I also like them best, possibly because I've used them the most. (I'd like to find another pair that's as lightweight and has the same density of carding cloth. I've been looking intermittently for a number of years.)
I charge one carder with wool. "Charging" the carder means, ideally, catching one end of each lock in the teeth and spreading wool evenly across the surface; it's not a precise process, but you don't want to embed the wool in the teeth, just snag a bit there so it holds momentarily. The amount of wool on the carder matters a lot. Too much or too little makes the work harder; too much is worse than too little.
This is when the wool actually looks the least promising that it will in this whole start-to-finish process—even more dismal than it did when it was dirty, because all the imperfections are glaring at me. I can see all the neps. I can't charge the cards cleanly because of the jumbles and varying lock lengths. I pull off a couple of second cuts that pop to the surface. I leave the others that are more entangled.
I card the wool. As it turns out, three passes does the most good without belaboring the wool and potentially snarling it. The results will never be perfectly even; that's impossible here. I pull off a few more neps that show up on the surface of the fiber.
After the three passes, I lift the wool out of the teeth of the carders and roll it into a rolag. Because the fiber is so fine and short, this rolag almost looks and feels like a puni (I linked to Joan Ruane there; she knows a whole lot about cotton; punis are a traditional preparation for cotton spinning).
Puni-like or not, this wool does not feel "cotton-y." It's quite airy and offers the promise of some bounce . . . "bounce" in the fine-wool sense, which is a subtle thing. These qualities hint at the character I remember in the yarn made from this breed's wool by a spinner who entered it in the Save the Sheep contest.
There's another easy-to-remove second cut at the arrow. I pull it off the surface.
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I made four rolags at the end of the evening and went to bed somewhat depressed. I know the potential of the wool that this breed produces, and it's going to be hard to demonstrate that with this fiber. There was clearly something special about their wool if I've remembered one encounter for years.
At the same time, these sheep are so seriously at risk of extinction that the caretakers of the few animals that remain—in several small flocks, geographically separated—are focusing their efforts on just keeping the animals going in an appropriate breeding population. Wool is the least of their concerns. Wool regrows. As long as the animals are alive and healthy, the wool can receive better attention in future years.
Yet if we can show how wonderful the wool is, then growing and selling the wool (carefully tended) produces another, fairly strong, economic force to support this conservation effort.
I almost started spinning to see how the fiber would look as yarn, because I was afraid that it wouldn't even hint at the potential, but I didn't want to do that when I was tired. I went to sleep wondering if I'd ever experience that magical hand again, or if the sum of efforts to maintain the bit of biodiversity that this breed of sheep represents would all be inadequate.
But the questions of breed survival are all topics for another day, and I knew better than to spin when I was feeling this discouraged. I'm rarely so discouraged. So I chalked it up to fatigue and quit for the day.
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In the morning, I spun one rolag. I'll talk about that in another post. Imperfect as it was, it gave me enough hope to move forward again, and soon I had six more imperfect rolags . . .
. . . a total of ten from my small colander-full of wool.
Plus a bunch of clots I pulled out. This isn't all of them, but it's a representative collection—some more dense, some less so:
Three rolags before I was done, something unfortunate occurred:
The back of one of my favorite carders split, all the way across. They're curved-back carders and one was suddenly a floppy flat-backed carder. Using it gently and making the other half of the pair do the hard work, I completed the rolags and headed home (where I wasn't at the time) for a meeting with the wood glue.
I found the glued carder a place to sit without pressure on the curved back while it dries, and a way to keep the join in the curved wood secured overnight.
I hope the mending line holds.
In the next installment of this series, I'll talk about spinning imperfect yarn from imperfectly prepared imperfect fleece.
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Copyright 2008 Deborah Robson
We spinners in particular parts of the globe at the beginning of the twenty-first century have been pretty spoiled by the availability of clean, combed or carded, organized, sweet-smelling fiber. Lots of that fiber has been dyed luscious colors. We see, we want, we buy, we take home, we spin (and we blog).
There are compelling reasons to track fiber back to its source and learn to begin with the raw material. That's a topic for another time (or several other times), except for a brief discussion now about dealing with less-than-perfect fleece. Because sometimes there are compelling reasons to hand-process less-than-perfect fleece.
Why?
In this case, I'm spinning wools from rare breeds. One of the ways we can ensure the survival of the genetic resources embodied in rare breeds is to create markets for their wool. In order to do that, we need to know something about the wool. In order to become knowledgeable, we need to spin it.
I'm not going to name the breed I'm spinning right now because that's not important to this discussion. It's a severely endangered breed that is superbly adapted to a particular environment. Beyond the other genetic traits that argue in favor of our facilitating its survival, it grows wool that, years ago, was spun into one of the most tactilely appealing yarns I've ever encountered—it had an almost magical hand ("hand" being the textile person's word for the way a fiber or fabric feels). In the nineteenth century, many more years ago, a major newspaper referred to it as some of the best wool on the planet (I'm paraphrasing; the praise was high).
Few of these sheep survive. Getting fiber took some doing. Someone generously sent me a sample. Having it here is a minor miracle.
Evaluation
Time for initial an initial assessment of what's in front of me:
This is what any handspinner would call an imperfect fleece. It contains vegetable matter (shorthand VM; bits of stick and grass and the like) and dirt (various types). There are some second cuts (places where the shearer took two passes with the shears and left tiny bits of wool at the butt, or cut, end of the locks). Sometimes second cuts are easy to pull, or occasionally just brush, off the inside of the fleece. Because of the fineness of this fiber, that wasn't the case here. Second cuts will be something I'll deal with from start to finish on this fiber. I'll pay some attention to them, but I won't let myself get obsessed; I'll have to go with the flow of this particular fleece and see what happens. The locks are really short: 1.5 to 1.75 inches (37.5 to 45 mm), unstretched.
Here's a closer view:
The green color on that piece of VM is one piece of good news. Another is the softness of the mass of wool. This has been freshly shorn. The grease hasn't hardened on the fiber. The VM will be mostly supple instead of prickery. The tips, although clumped together by dirt (and a bit of dung here and there), aren't felted or fragile, and the muck hasn't turned into near-crockery. The portions of the locks toward the inside of the fleece (the cut ends, the most recent growth, the parts protected by the tips, which gathered the muck and didn't let it go deep into the wool) are white and soft. And yet more good news: the wool feels bouncy, with some crimp and loft to it . . . those would have been the qualities that would have contributed to the magical hand of that long-ago yarn.
I already know that with this particular fleece I won't be able to spin a yarn like the one that I remember. This wool is too short and too dirty (it's the type of dirt that matters, not the quantity), and has too many second cuts and other neppy clumps.
But because of its rarity, because of my overall project, and because it looks workable, I proceed with washing.
Washing
The wool is in a colander about 8.5 inches (22 cm) across inside a slightly larger bowl in my kitchen sink, which has two basins. I'm working with about a third of the mass seen in the first photo. The picture below shows the third wash; the water is still dirty, but it's nowhere near as grubby as the water from the first two washes (I only thought to start taking photos of washing when I got to number three).
Here's the process:
There's actually a terrific wool-washing tutorial at what turns out to be a site embodying some of the wisdom of Straw Into Gold. Considering that Straw was one of my most important suppliers in the dark ages (even though I didn't live nearby and depended on UPS to make the connection), perhaps it's appropriate that I've been washing my wool for decades using the methods described here. There's a lot more detail. It's good detail.
Because this wool was so grubby, I did several things that aren't part of my wool-washing routine and that I don't recommend except when absolutely necessary.
After the first couple of washes, when it became apparent that more active work was required or I'd be dipping and draining for weeks, I gently rubbed the tips of the wool between my (glove-clad) fingers to release it from the still-caked dirt. I also lifted the mass of wool and set it in the colander with the bottom side up, again to help release more dirt into the water below the colander. I did handle this fleece a lot more than usual, and used motions that I'd normally use to make felt . . . on quite a fine wool that would be expected to felt easily, even without prime conditions. I just didn't use those motions very long in any single location.
Two washes is the normal amount. (Sometimes I do an initial cold-water soak in plain water; the amount of time the wool spends in this soak isn't critical; it can be a few hours or overnight. There's no temperature issue involved.)
After five washes, I decided enough was enough, even though the wash water still wasn't as clear as it usually gets.
Here's rinse bath number one—same temperature, but no detergent. The wool is not perfectly clean, but it's significantly whiter. I've generally ignored the VM, except to pull out the obvious stuff.
This is obviously not a perfect washing job. Any attempt to reach that level would be counterproductive—it would at least waste time, and maybe turn the wool into felt.
Three rinses. Also more than usual.
I'm still ignoring the VM. It will likely fall out in the next stages of processing. I've also got some remaining dirt, but I've been here approximately 5 x 20 plus 3 x 20 minutes, and even though I've been working while the wool soaked I've got other things to do that require fewer interruptions.
I roll the wool in a terrycloth towel and squeeze it gently to remove some of the water. The towel is what is handy; a salad spinner would also work, but I don't have one right now that's reserved for fiber use. (I also scrubbed out both sinks with cleanser.)
So now the wool gets to dry. This is one of the few times that it's advantageous to live in a semi-arid climate. The Manx Loaghtan wool (the brown) is 99% dry after just an overnight rest on the drying rack (the tips are sun-lightened, a characteristic of the breed, but not a problem). My new wool joins it, and because there's less of it than the Manx and it's not as dense in the locks it will dry even more rapidly.
I won't really know what I have to work with until the wool is fully dry and I start the next steps.
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