Bringing in the Fleece

This year, I got to see another side of the lovable Shenandoah Valley Fiber Festival, by helping out as a volunteer on the Fleece Sale.

A fleece sale, for those not familiar with the concept, is a chance for handspinners to buy a raw, unprocessed whole fleece, just as it comes from the freshly shorn sheep. Raw fleeces are full of all kinds of stuff: bits of weeds and vegetable matter that has clung to the sheep, fresh moist natural lanolin, pleasant ripe animal smells, and -- most of all -- possibility.

The SVFF fleece sale is juried, meaning the fleeces are inspected for quality by an expert judge before being admitted into the sale. It's a big job for the two experts, and so there are opportunities for willing volunteers to help with the physical labor, listen, and learn.

The day before the festival begins, the shepherds bring their fleeces to the judges to be evaluated and entered in the sale. Some bring just a couple of fleeces, and others bring half a dozen or more, each a large double-armful in its own plastic bag.

Now the volunteers swing into action. One writes up tags, noting down the shepherd and the breed or hybrid of the sheep that supplied each fleece, and often the individual sheep's own name. Others empty the fleece from its plastic bag onto a mesh table, loose debris falling through onto the concrete floor.

Spreading out a fleece so it can be examined is a careful job. A skilled shearer will have trimmed the fleece off a sheep all in one big piece that hangs together in the shape of the animal itself, a phantom sheepskin rug. It's easy enough to dump the bundled fleece out of its bag, but the mass of wool must then be gently picked open and fully unrolled on the table, without the loosely linked clumps of wool becoming tangled and breaking apart from the delicate whole-body shape.

After the fleece is unrolled, the volunteers check it over quickly for any bits and pieces that should come out. The shepherd will already have taken out the mucky parts and poor quality areas around the hindquarters. But still, there are smaller things to be removed, like second cuts (bits of short, unusable wool where the shepherd ran the clippers over an overlapping spot again), or burrs and noticeable bits of hay or weeds.

Then the expert judges are called over. They plunge experienced hands in to feel the fineness of the wool. They check the length of the fibers in the locks of wool. They test small clumps for soundness, both visually and by a good sharp lengthwise tug. They assign the fleece to a category, be it fine, medium, long, or double-coated. Sometimes the category is clear from the sheep's breed, and sometimes the judges rely on their own assessment, particularly for hybrids, which can vary widely from one individual to another. They write notes on the fleece's tag, commenting on such things as the quality of the wool, the color, the length, the cleanness, or appropriate uses, to provide guidance for buyers.

When the judges finish with each fleece, the volunteers fold and roll it into a neat ball, stuff it back into its bag, and cart it to its spot on the long table of fleeces for sale.

It wasn't glamorous work. The temperature hit 98 degrees that day. Each fleece typically weighed 4-7 pounds. The wool was full of dirt and grease, and our hands shone from the lanolin. We were grubby and hot. But it was fascinating, and I learned a lot. One thing I found interesting is that the judges actually did reject a few fleeces, for instance, if there was a weak spot in the length of the wool resulting from the animal having an episode of poor health as it grew. Truly, only good-quality fleeces were accepted for the sale.

And the day was at times poignant. I met shepherds who handed over a number of fleeces with obvious pride, shepherds who hoped their fleeces would sell to bring in some money to keep the flock fed, and one dear lady who shears her sheep with ordinary scissors and great care.

To a spinner's eyes, a fleece is just beautiful. Just look at that rich natural color, with the tips of the sheep's coat lightened a little bit by its year in the sun.

Lovely as they are, though, I resisted buying one the next day when they went on sale. I've processed one small fleece so far, and it takes some time. The lanolin and dirt have to be washed out in a series of hot baths, the fleece laid out to dry, and the sweet-smelling clumps of clean wool carded or combed, and put away ready for spinning. I'm game to do it again, but not just yet. I've got a lot of work to do first to clear the decks.

So it wasn't easy, but I held back from buying both there and the following week at the Fall Fiber Festival, where I strolled purely as a shopper.

I simply gave the fleece sale tent a wide berth and stayed as far away as possible from temptation. :)

Oh Frabjous Day!

"Calloo, Callay!" she chortled in her joy.

Snicker-snack. We've made short work of my little Jacob fleece, the Frumious Bandersnatch and I. Here it is, my new Strauch Petite drum-carder, with its big teeth that clack. It was a thrilling Christmas present from world's-most- patient-husband, which I'd been itching to put through its paces. (But it wasn't the only thrilling fiber-related Christmas present, more on which another day!)

We began once the scoured fleece was clean and dry.








I decided to sort the wool to enjoy the separate colors rather than let them blend into a single mid-range tone.


I got to work, gingerly at first, loosening up the locks of wool with my fingers, picking out bits of straw and weeds as best I could, and laying the locks on the intake tray to be picked up by the toothy rotating drums and carded into batts of fiber. I learned as I went. Peeling the rectangle of carded wool off the drum, I would primp it and put it through again until it seemed reasonably smooth and well blended. When the first few batts were done, and drawn out and wound up into balls of roving ready for spinning, I was ready to burst with excitement.

As I got a little more practice, I noticed the lumps and little matted ends of the locks were taking several runs to untangle, and quite a bit of loose short fiber was collecting on the surface. Some locks had an awful lot of dried vegetable matter that was hard to pick out. Naively, I hoped that what I couldn't get out with my fingers would fall out on its own as the drum's teeth combed through it. Some did fall out, but more actually got broken up and distributed efficiently through the batt as I cranked.

It was time for some research on-line. I found that experienced carders recommend teasing as the best way to get the dry grassy bits out. Teasing, as they meant it, was more than just opening the locks of wool by hand as I had been doing. I needed a secret weapon.

This. A dog brush, a relic of my dearly loved fellows who have been gone for a while, though they lived to a ripe old age. I don't think they would mind. They'd have been very curious about all this wool and the creature it came from, and would have given it all a good sniffing over. Oh, I do miss them.

But the dog brush worked wonders. In a process called flick carding, it took out all the tangles and mats, sorted out the too-short fibers, and swept out the vegetable matter. The locks were so beautifully brushed and fanned out, once I'd been after them with the dog brush, that I half wondered at the necessity to run them through the drum-carder at all. But of course the drum-carder blends the colors beautifully, which vary significantly even within the separated colors, from one little lock to another, and from base to sun-bleached tip. And the rovings that result from drum-carding are the form I want for spinning, rather than individual locks, lovely as they are.

So, my later balls of roving were much slower to produce, but cleaner and more finely prepared than the earlier ones. Once I had worked out what it really took to prepare each bit for the carder, the pile of raw wool seemed to loom taller than ever. But I chipped away at it day by day, and now... victory!

I did lose quite a bit of weight in the processing (or rather, I didn't, but the fleece did). I started with 1.6 pounds and ended up with just over 1/2 pound. Some of this was the lanolin that washed out, and the weedy bits that I labored so hard to remove. Some of it was little tangles from the sheep just going about the business of being a sheep, getting rained on, drying in the sun, maybe getting stuck in a thicket, or scratching his itchy back up against a tree or fence-post. But there also seemed to be a surprising number of those unusable short clumps of fibers called second cuts, resulting from a certain, shall we say, insouciance in the shearing. Novice that I am, though, I'm sure a lot of the loss was due to inexperience, and I'll do better next time!

But now I have 1/2 pound of wool in three beautiful colors from one little sheep, lovingly prepared for spinning by yours truly. I'm so proud of it!

Five Things I Learned from a Fleece

Last fall at the Fall Fiber Festival in Montpelier, Virginia, I bought my first raw fleece. For a new spinner, it had begun to seem irresistible to take some wool essentially just as it falls from the sheep's back during shearing, and take it all the way through cleaning, and carding, and spinning. I could knit something I had carried from beginning to finished product.

Looking through the bags of wool in the fleece sale, I had no particular idea what to look for. Each different type looked like a wonderful adventure. The one I chose was from a Jacob sheep, from a local Virginia shepherd. These sheep are immensely appealing little fellows, both because they have parti-colored black-and-white coats, like a spotted dog, and because some of the rams are graced with rather strange-looking double horns.

Aside from admiring the breed itself, I was attracted to the chance to work with wool in more than one color and to the small quantity in this particular bag. It's only 1.6 pounds, which certainly isn't a whole fleece. But it was perfectly adequate to my purpose of just getting my feet wet at working with raw fiber. And isn't it beautiful?

Jacob fleece can be handled different ways for different color effects, blended thoroughly to make a heathery gray, or made into a sort of spotty ragg wool effect with different colors plied together, or the colors entirely separated to make different solid-colored yarns.

A week or two ago, I decided to jump in and have a go at the first step in the process: scouring the fleece, which means giving it a thorough washing to remove the lanolin and dirt. I had read about it in various spinning books and on-line. Once again, all I can say is all that book learning doesn't hold a candle to the experience of working with the real thing. There is nothing like trying it for yourself.

That little Jacob fleece has taught me quite a lot.

1. People who process wool for spinning really earn their pay. This is hard, time-consuming work. It's not particularly expensive to buy prepared rovings. To do this oneself, one needs to have a conscious reason. For this first try, learning what it's like was reason enough for me. After that, it might be for the satisfaction and self-sufficiency of creating things from the sheep forward. It might be to know what animal one's sweater has come from. It might be to be able to choose the perfect type of fleece for a particular purpose. It might be to have the control to prepare the wool in a specific way for the desired spinning result. But there ought to be a reason.

2. The life of a happy sheep is a life of plenty of dirt. Twigs. Weeds. Burrs. Ladybugs. Even, I fear, the occasional dingleberry (though in fairness, it may have been a food pellet). Playing with a fleece is a dirty business. Just trying to separate big wads of it for washing resulted in a lot of fallen debris. That may be a job best done in warm weather, outdoors.

3. There are a couple of things that make it easier to get it clean. It takes soaking in lots of hot soapy water to dissolve the lanolin and get the dirt out. But not necessarily the hotter the better. If the water is so hot you can't even handle the wool to squeeze out the water between soakings, then some very dirty water stays right in the wool, wash after wash. Mesh laundry bags make excellent containers to keep the wool organized and allow the water to run through. Zippered pillow-covers do not. They're too watertight, and the filthy water won't run out. Wash after wash. After a couple of rounds with a motley assemblage of mesh bags and pillow covers, I went to the store for more mesh bags. It was worth it. I think in the end, I washed the wool six or seven times in hot, hot soapy water, and another three or four times in clear rinse-water.

4. It's a smelly job. I'd seen people refer to raw fleece as smelly, and I didn't understand what the fuss was about. I could bury my nose in my lovely bag of unwashed fleece, and it had a pleasant mild animal smell, nothing at all to complain of. But when it's hot from the soaking water, ahh, that's a different story. It's a bit aromatic and gamy. Thankfully, once the wool is clean and dry, it smells sweet again.

5. I really don't know much about fleece. Are those stains, or just natural coloration? What makes a good fleece? Are those areas matted, or are those tight bundles just the normal structure? Has the fleece been skirted (messy wool removed from the edges)? I don't know what that looks like. I learned to recognize second cuts (too-short tufts of wool caused by the shearer's clippers running over the same spot a second time); how many are normal? How much can I handle the wet fleece without felting it?

But now I know a little more than I did before. I'll learn a little more yet with each time I try it. And it feels immensely satisfying to see the nice clean locks of wool spread out to dry, and to know that I can do this, and that I'll be making something with one little sheep's coat that I cleaned and prepared myself.

There's a lot of happiness in that. Reason enough.