I have been working over the past few weeks in processing and spinning my Shetland fleeces from my own herd. However I recently came into possession of the Shetland fleece pictured above. The owner was about to get rid of the fleece via burning it, as she had no idea what to do with it. Yes that is a greater than 8 inch staple length! Unfortunately the tips are badly matted and felted and might need to be snipped, however this is where all of the veggie matter is located, so maybe snipping it out will be the better approach.

I am washing a load right now and that will be done drying in a few days, at which point I shall comb some up and see what it’s like. Even though it has matted tips, the root ends are so fine and clean and a wonderful light white shade. This fleece is a diamond in the rough, that’s for sure!

While prepping the fleece for its washing, I quickly hand-spun up a small double ply sample of yarn. It is very strong and uniform in color/texture, so I have high hopes that some amount of success will be met with this adventure.

The last we left him, Frankie was looking a little like this – shorn by Yours Truly, albeit a patchy job!

For the past few weeks I’ve been working on processing Frankie’s fleece. Today I started the last batch of it, and remembered to bring the camera along for the show.

This is what the raw fleece looks like up close. Lots of grass bits and hay. In the middle of the shot you can see some of the lanolin clinging to the fibers. The first stage of fleece cleaning is to pick out the big bits, which is a really nice relaxing activity at the end of the day.

Once the big bits are picked out, the fleece looks much better! You can see above there are still lots of little dirt bits and other vegetable matter. This will come out gradually over the next few steps. At this time I group the fleece into piles of different colors or lengths. Frankie is actually designated as being grey, most of his fleece is white as pictured above but he does have some grey areas as well as grey hairs scattered throughout his white parts.

The next step is to put it into bags for washing in the tub. I use these lingerie bags which I bought at my local grocery store.

Then it’s into the bathtub filled with hot water and dish soap. I’m glossing over the details as I’ve covered them in a previous blog post. You let the fleece soak in hot soapy water for 30-40 minutes, then drain the water and do it all over again a few times.

I experimented with a new method of drying the cleaned fleece. It’s basically putting the fleece onto a window screen, which allows air to circulate both on top and below. Adding a fan to circulate the air faster got the job of drying the fleece done in far less time than my previous (space-limited) method of laying it out on a towel. I am now thinking of ways to create a multi-tiered drying rack to really speed up the process.

Once dried, the combing begins! This is the stage that takes the longest amount of time and dedication. I use the hand combs my Dad made for me to, well, comb the fibers. This lets all the little dirt bits and veggie matter fall out, aligns all the fibers in the same direction, and eliminates small fibers or second cuts. It takes anywhere from 5-10+ passes of combing it for the fibers to become really clean and perfect. Once you’re satisfied, you simply pull the fibers off to make one giant fiber snake known as a sliver. More specifically, this is a worsted sliver of fiber, which is different from a woolen rolag of fiber… but that is another blog post altogether!

Here is a sliver formed into a ball for ease of handling. You can see a few bits here and there, these will come out when the fiber is drawn and spun up into yarn. And even if there are one or two bits that stay into the final yarn, it adds to the homemade feel!

And finally, here is a completed skein of Frankie yarn! This was made with 8 balls of combed fiber, each rotation of my yarn counter is about 2 meters, so this skein of yarn is around 81 meters long and weighs just over 50 grams. It is on the thicker side, as it will be for a hat.

I’ve got quite a way to go before Frankie’s fleece is completely done with, and of course I have the three girls’ fleeces ready to be washed and combed next. If I expand my flock enough in the next years I might consider sending some of my fleeces to a processing mill to be washed and turned into roving – while processing by hand is relaxing and enjoyable, it’s simply not possible to make a living off of 100% home processed yarn. However, this is certainly a path to making unique, love-filled gifts.

If you have a top loading washing machine, you can use that. As I currently reside in an apartment, I do not have one of these, however I do have a second bathroom and tub so that is where I am cleaning my fleece.

To remove the lanolin, you need to use a dish detergent such as Sunlight or Dawn. You must not use bar soap as that will cause the fibers to felt (in fact, you can cover a bar of soap with fibers and agitate them to make a felted soap). Dish detergent will remove the grease and dirt without contributing to felting.

Another component that will help to remove the lanolin is heat. You can accomplish this by using super hot water. My apartment has its own hot water heater which means a close source of very hot water. For an urban wool processor, this second bathroom facilitates the washing of the fleece.

I recommend using lingerie bags (a very light netted bag) to put your dry fleece in to handle it while washing. My tub perfectly fit 3 lingerie bags of wool side by side, the bags made changing the water much easier. I was able to put in 3/4 of my white wool into the three bags, I still have some white and the skirted stuff to wash later. The bags were not stuffed but were also not sparsely loaded, they only had one layer of fleece but had no gaps of space between them.

I added a good amount of dish soap, enough to give the water a yellow tint, and ran the hot water until the tub was more than half full. The temperature of the water at this point was 133F. Once the water was prepared, I laid the bags of fleece on top of the water and let them sit for a minute. I then gently pressed them into the water. Then, set it and forget it for 35-40 minutes.

Resist the urge to fondle it, touch it, massage it, for now is a very critical time where the fibers can felt easily, due to the conditions (wet, hot, agitation). And if it felts, it is done, there is no undoing it. Beyond that, the fibers simply don’t need your massaging, the hot water and dish detergent will do a suitable job.

I returned after 40 minutes and found some of the most disgusting water I’ve ever seen! Eeeeeeewww! I couldn’t believe all of that was from my fleece, it seemed so clean beforehand. I took the lingere bags out of the water and let them drip off while emptying the tub and filling it with hot water again. To reduce the chances of felting you should keep the fleece at the same temperature, so I recorded the temperature of the fleece after it stewed (120F) and matched that in the new water. Again, I added dish detergent, laid the fleeces on the water, gently poked them into it, and let them sit for another half hour.

This time the water wasn’t so gross, although it was certainly still brown, and down to 110F. Drain the fleece, rinse the tub, add the water, soak the fleece for another half hour. I did not add any detergent though, this will be the first clean rinse.

Returning after 30 minutes and draining the tub showed that the fleece was without any soap and had a lot of dirt taken out of it. The tub’s water was very much transparent with a very light brown coming out only when the fleece was pressed (as I did not agitate the fleece a lot). I decided it could use another rinse, so I repeated the process with cooler water (didn’t bother to measure the temperature, it was pretty lukewarm).

After this rinse I decided to take it out, very little was in the draining liquid. I took it out, pulled them out of the bags, and set them up on racks and towels to dry with a fan pointed at them. Even after a few hours they were still a bit damp. However, the fleece is indeed nice and clean, albeit with some smaller bits of VM still in.

My fleece was purchased completely raw. It still had plenty of vegetable matter (they call this VM) such as burrs, twigs, even a flower or two. Oh, and poop. Certain parts of the fleece, namely those around the butt and back legs, will often have “tags”, which are felted pieces of fleece and poop. They are pretty much useless and should be discarded. Other veggie matter can be picked out. From what I’ve heard in pretty much all stages you will pick out veggie matter, but I figure I’d get as much out before washing as I could.

My fleece also still had lanolin. Lanolin is a wax produced by the sheep’s skin to keep it hydrated and protected from the sun, as well as conditioning its fibers and protecting them against water. It makes a great moisturizer for humans, and is a component in many cosmetics. You generally want to remove this from the fleece before spinning it, although you can spin it “in the grease”. To remove the lanolin, you need to use hot water.

The first thing I did with my fleece was to skirt it, or remove 3-6 inches around the edge. Much of this is felted and useless. However my sheep’s genetics cause it to have a darker shade of fiber on its legs, and I didn’t really want to lose all of it so I skirted very little of my fleece and have kept it. Once I am done processing the majority of it, I will come back and see what I can salvage from the skirted area. Already I know it will require much more washing and picking apart, but since I am only processing one fleece, time is really inconsequential.

After it was skirted, I started cleaning it up. I pulled off pieces of the fleece, generally a 3×2 chunk, took out the big pieces of VM and any poop, shook it to get any dust and loose bits off, and piled the pieces into large plastic shopping bags.

Surprisingly enough, this took less than an hour. At the end, I was left with two Loblaws green shopping bags (larger than your average shopping bag) of white/creamish fleece, half a bag of skirted brown fleece, and a tiny bag of waste.