#sheep fleece

[tyrhinosaurus]

10min of double speed wool combing of English Leicester fleece. Original audio

[ezekiellsplayground]

Last step of processing the swedish helsinge lamb is carding the thel (inner coat) into fluffy rolags. I’m using my extra large hand carders made by Celestial Farms.

[whatthefibre]

I got 3 sheep fleeces for free and they're all really good quality. No felting, minimal VM and the tags were easy to pick out. You can't really see here but the fleeces have some very pretty colour variation.

I washed some of it. Unfortunately the weather wasn't in my favour, so I had to let it dry inside(I used old baking trays to let it drip properly) which took a lot longer.

I haven't started further processing it cause I'm unsure on how to handle this wool. You can see the locks aren't uniform. At the bottom the hair is shorter and soft(grey parts) and (mostly visible at the top) distributed throughout are these longer coarser hairs. I think if I'll comb this the hairs would seperate and I'll have a lot of waste. Any suggestions on how to handle this wool best would be greatly appreciated.

[woollywooloo]

I went to a small local wool fair and got some new goodies 🥰

[ezekiellsplayground]

Wool washing day was a whole afternoon affair. This is my 700 grams of merino suffolk cross from Scotts Creek Farm in NSW, Australia.

First pic is the wool in the second bath with dirt water from the initial bath in the other bucket. Next pictures are from halfway through the soap baths and the last soap bath where the water is pretty clear showing no more dirt or lanolin is being drawn from the wool.

I like to dry my locks on a herb dryer I got from amazon. Once completely dry (which took a few days in Aussie summer) I was rewarded with lovely fluffy wool, with a tight, springy crimp. Don’t worry about the dirt on the lock ends, it’s been fried from the washing and will fall right out during the next processing stage.

[ezekiellsplayground]

The first load of fleece (about 1/3rd) has been washed. Lanolin dissolves in water thats 60C, but wool doesn’t like hot temperature or sudden temperature changes otherwise it’ll felt. So it’s important to keep the water hot across the baths & to only gently paddle the wool to encourage lanolin/urine/sweat/dirt/etc to come out with the soap. There is 1-2 rinse baths after the scour baths, which isn’t shown, just to get any remaining soap out.

[ezekiellsplayground]

Had this itty bitty piece of fleece that I don’t have a use for, so I offered it up to someone for use as a hair-like material for their faux taxidermy art. I combed the washed locks & pulled off onto my mini hackle in small amounts. To secure the wool into lines suitable for sewing I stuck some archival tape on one side to help pass everything through the sewing machine. I think the resulting product will be pretty effective as ‘hair’!

[tyrhinosaurus]

I found a fleece market day a few hours from home, and omg I had such a good time. There was so much to look at and touch and smell! I came home with 3 fleeces: a dark grey merino cross, a middle brown moorit (@milkweedman was it you who likes moorit?), and a section of piebald superfine merino!

I've never bought whole fleeces before, I'm so excited to spin it up. I keep dreaming of jumpers, but need to get started on spinning before I dream too big.

I started washing locks of the merino cross tonight, trying to maintain lock structure for semi-worsted spinning, but we'll see if that lasts, there's a lot of locks XD I'm also not sure how much lanolin I've actually removed lol, so will have a check in the morning and see.