The Independent Stitch

Maryland Sheep & Wool Festival 2012

I'm so far behind on blogging that I'll never catch up, so here's an overview of this year's wonderful Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival. I taught a two-day workshop on rare wools, participated in as much of the book signing as I could get to, and facilitated two walkabout classes in the barns, which was a new event and a lot of crazy fun.

Here's everybody except the photographer (and me; I'm organizing things off to the left) concentrating on a new fiber. (Thanks, Nancy, for taking pictures while I was all-out focused on teaching!)

One of the biggest reasons that I love teaching is the great people I get to meet. And that's a roomful of them.

And here are the fibers at the start of the workshop:

We worked our way through them over two days. Our selection for this workshop included:

• Black Welsh Mountain
• Clun Forest
• Dorset Horn
• Gulf Coast Native
• Jacob (American)
• Leicester Longwool
• Navajo-Churro
• North Ronaldsay
• Oxford
• Romeldale/CVM
• Santa Cruz
• Shetland
• Wensleydale

. . . and, courtesy of BitsyKnits, a sampling of Sharlea, which is a rare wool although not from a rare breed (it's specially grown and prepared Saxon Merino).

Thanks once again to The Spinning Loft and Spirit Trail Fiberworks for making these workshops possible. There's no way I could acquire, wash, and prepare all the fibers myself. I do some of that work: The Spinning Loft does most of it, with essential contributions from Spirit Trail.

On several of the evenings, after we had finished teaching, Maggie Casey and I were lucky enough to walk around the lake near the hotel. (I was looking for a photo of Maggie, but we'll have to settle for a selection of her DVDs and her book.)

The barn walkabouts on Saturday and Sunday mornings were amazing. Registration was limited to a small group so we could move with relative compactness through the barns and talk about wools in connection with the sheep that grow them. We only had time to do barn 8: and it was a full three hours! There was a lot of variety in breeds and many topics to consider. The walkabout description said we'd cover between 10 and 12 breeds. Because they were there, we saw and talked about more than 25!

On Sunday, I juggled myself back and forth between the walkabout, the book signing, and the Parade of Breeds, which is my favorite event at the festival. Here's a Border Cheviot (in front) and a Border Leicester (behind):

My favorite Shetland ram was there again, once again charming everyone within viewing distance. This year he had been shorn before the festival—many more of the sheep were in their summer wear this year than usual. The dogwoods and azaleas had also passed their bloom-time (climate change affecting shearing, as well as blossoms?).

Sue Blacker and Douglas Bence of Blacker Designs and Blacker Yarn in the UK attended the festival and gave a presentation on the value-added work they do to increase shepherds' and farmers' income from the fiber their animals grow. One of the things they have done recently is work with some wonderful, visionary people to produce what is likely the first commercially spun Boreray yarn, and here's a ball of it!

Boreray is a rare breed of sheep from the same small set of islands, called St Kilda, that are home to the Soay. This Boreray yarn is one of two that the Blacker mill is producing. The other will be a blend of finer Boreray fleeces, hand selected, with Soay wool, as a St Kilda laceweight. I can't tell you how exciting this is. It's one of the fantastic ideas that grew out of the odd experience that was UK Knit Camp in 2010.

What with teaching, book signing, and a few wonderful meetings, I finally got to walk around the festival for a short while at the end of Sunday. I spent most of that time taking pictures of sheep. And this Karakul sheep from Redgate Farm looked exactly like I felt at that point:

So it was time to call the festival a huge success and wonderful time, and to go home.

At least for a few days.

Santa Cruz wool: how to show a rare breed's magic with a less-than-ideal sample?

I've written before about Santa Cruz wool, in conjunction with a post about making the best of a less-than-ideal wool sample. Now that it's time to do my write-up on Santa Cruz wool, I have been distracted by my desire to show at least some of the capacity of this breed's wool, which is not evident in the sample I've already spun.

Santa Cruz is one of the rarest sheep breeds. It's on the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy's priority list with critical status. There's a long story behind this—one that I won't go into right now, because my goal is to highlight the superb qualities of the fiber. No one knows exactly when or how sheep got onto Santa Cruz Island off the coast of California, somewhere between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. They were well established by the mid-nineteenth century. By other people's best guesses, the breed was created through some combination of Merino, Rambouillet, and possibly Churro. The sheep don't look like Merinos or Rambouillets, although their wool is clearly fine enough to have been influenced by those breeds.

Remembering the magic, and struggling with the available fiber

What is most stunning about the fiber is its combination of fineness and bounce.

When I coordinated the Save the Sheep Project for Spin-Off Magazine in the late 1990s, one of the entries was a shawl that Nancy Van Tassel made from Santa Cruz wool shorn from one of the few rescued sheep. I've seen and handled a lot of handspun yarn over about thirty-five years of intense involvement with spinning. That shawl and the yarn it was made from have stood out vividly in my memory for the combination of softness and resilience. I have never felt anything like it.

When I spun my sample last year, I got what looked like the best possible option out of the wool sample we were able to obtain—and with Santa Cruz, we are fortunate to be able to get a sample at all. With a breed this rare, the primary focus of husbandry is simply keeping enough animals alive to keep the breed going and, ideally, with enough genetic diversity for a healthy population. Wool quality is not at the top of anyone's agenda. If the genes are there, a future year's wool quality can be tended to and the crop will have some value. At this dire survival level, there's no well-defined market for the wool anyway.

Here's the sample I spun then . . . there was no way it could be regular, because of the fiber quality:

I was disappointed but felt like I needed to settle for what I had and move on. It didn't have the "life" that I remember so well from Nancy Van Tassel's contribution to the Save the Sheep efforts, but she had control over her fiber source and some experience in spinning the breed. Last year, that skein was the best I thought I could do, perhaps because I wasn't yet desperate enough.

I've been having trouble getting the breed written up, and I finally realized why. I want, somehow, to be able to at least hint at the magic that I know, thanks to Nancy, Santa Cruz wool is capable of. My existing sample didn't do that. I had no idea what I could pull off that might. But I determined to go at it one more time.

Throwing out all the rules

This is where all standard guidelines for wool prep and spinning have to go out the window, and vision and stubbornness take over, seasoned with a pragmatic awareness that perfection is simply out of reach.

Background: I had an OFDA computerized analysis done on a small tuft of this fiber. I'm having scans run for most of the very rare wools because we don't have much data on their characteristics. A data sample of one or two or five entries isn't much at all, but it's better than nothing.

Fineness: The average micron count of the piece I pulled (clean) was 23.2. That's fine. A full 97.3% of the fibers were under 30 microns, the industrial line of demarcation for fibers to be used in next-to-the-skin applications. The finest fibers in the sample were 14 microns; there were just a few fibers at the sample's maximum of 32, 33, and 34 microns.

Fiber length: 35 mm, or 1.4 inches. That's the kicker.

Because of the short fibers, and the fact that it was difficult to separate out anything resembling a staple, I used fine hand carders to prepare the wool for my first sample. This was the obvious, reasonable, normal choice for a short, jumbled fiber. The many neps and second cuts were just something I had to live with. I did end up choosing a drafting technique that would minimize the effects of these elements on the finished yarn.

This weekend, bullheadedly determined to see if I could do a better job of showing what the Santa Cruz wool is capable of, I decided to try combing. COMBING. Fiber less than 1.5 inches long. Right.

Okay, here goes.

From yuck to yum, believe it or not

Raw Santa Cruz wool, as I received it, with gratitude that I had any at all:

These look and feel like what would be skirtings for a "normal" fleece, but as I've mentioned this wool is probably just a shepherd's afterthought of survival care for the living animals. Based on my experience in washing, at least part of this came from the rear of the animal—not prime fleece territory. I had the sample above available to photograph in its original state because when the wool first arrived I only washed the portion I needed. It wasn't inspiring enough to wash the whole batch. That ended up being okay. I used Dawn dishwashing liquid, which was what I had at the time. I've since shifted to Unicorn Power Scour and took on the rest of the raw wool with that resource on my side. I knew the Power Scour wouldn't overclean (thus making the wool harsh or brittle), so I used more than I usually would and I ran the fiber through three, rather than two, cleansing baths, with one pre-soak and two rinses, using a mix of half hot-tap water and half boiling water from pots on the stove and not letting the water cool off for more than 20 minutes on each cycle.

Here's what the clean version looked like:

Not beautiful, but compared to what I started with it was greatly improved. I wasn't concerned about the flecks of dirt, because although they tend to stick around in carding and cause problems, they normally drop out in combing.

Most combs couldn't handle such a short, fine fiber. Fortunately, I have a pair of two-row Louet mini-combs that I thought might do the trick. Even so, because the fibers were so jumbled I needed to load the wool onto the combs not-quite-randomly, searching out bits of the fiber mass that seemed to have long-enough fibers and simply snagging them onto the teeth of the mini-combs as best I could. While I combed through two complete passes, I didn't look for perfection. That goal would have left me with zero fiber.

I pulled off the little sausages of prepared fiber with my fingers—there wasn't really enough there to draw off a sliver with a diz. The clump of fiber on the left in the photo above was the "waste" (which I'll use to stuff something with), and the three little bits of fiber just to its right are representative of what's in the clump—really short and useless. While the good-to-waste fiber ratio is low, I was starting with truly unpromising raw material and the end result. . . .

got me what I wanted.

How to show the magic?

I still don't know how to show, in photographs, what the difference is.

After I washed my new little skein, I handed it to my daughter and said, "Just play with it."

She immediately started stretching it. "Spandex????"

"Just wool. Magical wool."

Let's try to get a hint here, with the relaxed skeinlet:

And, against the same piece of flooring, the skeinlet extended, but not overextended:

With a normal wool, I'd expect to be able to stretch a similar skeinlet to half to three-quarters of the width of that second, righthand section of flooring. Not all the way across it.

One more counterintuitive comment: You'd normally think that a carded preparation, woolen spun, would be more elastic than a combed, worsted-spun yarn. (In this case, the first sample was spun with a hybrid draw, because there were too many irregularities to tolerate a long draw, but carding generally encourages more elasticity than combing.) In this case, the combed, worsted-spun yarn is the one with the maximum elasticity.

A few thoughts

If there were a premium-rate market for the wool for the most endangered breeds of sheep, like the Santa Cruz, the people who are keeping the animals alive would have more reasons to care for the fleece in ways that handspinners and other fiber artists could value. This type of support would need to be easy for the shepherds to set up and maintain; it would require additional attention to the wool during the year, and would need to repay that effort and then some. Because I'm preparing a post for later in this week about the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) business model as it applies to fibers, I'm impelled to wonder what would be involved for growers of the rarest breeds to set up subscription-based CSA-type groups to give them extra income to help fund their genetic conservation work. The groups would need to be small, because the yields would be relatively small—too small for the more "normal" breed-specific marketing efforts that are helping some other breeds remain financially viable.

There have got to be some ways that fiber folk can give an extra boost to the prospects of a breed like the Santa Cruz.

I'd hate to think the magic might vanish entirely.

Clockwise from left:

• First sample skein, prepared on fine hand carders and spun with a hybrid draw. Nothing special.
• Second sample skein, prepared on Louet two-row mini-combs and spun with a worsted draw. Captured some of the magic!
• White, clean Santa Cruz fiber.
• Black, raw Santa Cruz fiber—the breed has color genetics, and I have a sample but not enough to wash or work with.

Working with imperfect fleece: part 3, spinning

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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Copyright 2008 Deborah Robson

Working with imperfect fleece: part 2, carding

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.

1. "Cotton" carders, or carders with fine teeth.
2. My first "wool" carders, bought unfinished many years ago. I coated them with the same finish I used on my first wheel. They have fairly fine teeth, and have been broken in so thoroughly that the teeth are very flexible.
3. My replacement "wool" carders, newer, with slightly coarser teeth that are pretty stiff. They are also much heavier than my old carders.
4. Not a carder but an old dog brush that I use for cleaning all of the carders when I change fibers. The teeth are splayed from use, but it still does its job just fine.
   

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

Working with imperfect fleece: part 1, initial evaluation and washing

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:

1. Put the dry wool in the colander, which is sitting in the righthand sink. The blue bowl goes in the lefthand sink.
2. Fill the blue bowl two-thirds with the hottest water from the tap. Turn off the water and generously squirt in washing aid (I usually use the blue variety of Dawn dishwashing detergent); the goal is to make the water feel slippery but not to raise bubbles. Gently stir the water to distribute the detergent. Fill the bowl the rest of the way with near-boiling water from the teakettle. I like the water not so hot that I can't put my hand in, but hot enough that I don't want to keep it there. Thus the rubber glove.
3. Set the colander on top of the bowl. The wool will float on the surface and then begin to sink. Let it. (Sometimes I press it very gently just to submerge it, but that's just because I'm impatient.)
4. Remember that wool + hot water + soap agent + agitation = felt.
5. Set a timer for 15 or 20 minutes and go do something else. The goal is to move to the next step before the water has cooled down appreciably.
6. When the timer goes off, come back and lift the colander out of the bowl and set it in the righthand sink to drain. (Shake the colander up and down to push some of the excess water out.)
   
7. Empty the washing bowl, checking to see how clear the water is (or isn't). If there's sand or mud in the bottom of the bowl, rinse it out.
8. Repeat steps 2 through 7 as many times as needed, until the water in the washing bowl is clear, or nearly so.

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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Copyright 2008 Deborah Robson