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The next step is to wash the fleece.

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.

I have begun my own fleece adventure!

It all started with an idle Google search of “Ottawa fleeces”. Sure enough I found a Kijiji ad from a girl named Danielle who runs Riverglen Farm (outside of Dunrobin, about 35 minutes from my place in Ottawa), who had a variety of fleeces available for $25. As I have been watching Youtube videos for a few weeks before this, as well as archiving information in this blog, I decided to give it a shot! After all, the worst that can happen is I get a huge am0unt of wool felt, for which there are plenty of uses.

However, I feel pretty confident that I will succeed in processing this. It’s really not that hard from what I’ve read, so long as you are aware of the problems (felting, bugs, smells, etc) and their solutions.

I will be documenting each stage with blog posts and pictures. You can see all the pictures in this Flickr set.

Here is a picture of the fleece unrolled. It is from a yearling Shetland. I should contact Danielle to find out the critter’s name!