Scouring and Teasing Shetland Fleece

The shetland fleece, outer side up.

It's an incandescent day, ueber-sunny, cool and pleasant, and the cicadas are singing. With Noah home from school with a fever, it's a good opportunity to scour more of Rosemary's shetland fleece. Edit: This post was written before we knew that both boys were going to be really sick for days: high fever, headache, stomach issues, congestion, the works. Little curled-up balls of woe, they were. Christopher is still mending.

Let's take a picture walk, and see how I prepare it for spinning.

The Raw Fleece
The first job was to skirt the fleece. That means taking the extra-dirty, hay and burr and dung-touched outer edges of the fleece. Since the edges are made up of the belly side of the sheep fleece, it's no wonder it's so dirty, because little Mr. has been running around a meadow all year.  In the first picture we see the fleece, outer side up. Notice how long the wool is. Shetlands grow beautifully long locks. Notice that the fleece almost looks like a sheepskin rug in need of a wash. That's how thick the sheared fleece is!

Here is Mr. Shetland himself, in a picture taken by Laura Lough of Square Peg Farm. The sheep may be part Soay, another rare and "unimproved", as they call it, breed. Unimproved my eye. How anyone can improve on an impressive set of colors and softness fit for baby clothes, I can't imagine.

Rosemary's Shetland, who might be a Shetland-Soay mix. He was shorn recently and its his fleece I'm working with.
He's a sweetie and appears to be looking up for a potential treat. Photo courtesy Square Peg Farm.

Shetland fleece, skin side up. Notice the gray undercoat on the back? The back is in the center of the fleece and is the cleanest, highest-quality part.

Here is the outside, close up. Shetlands have waves in their wool. Here I am pointing to the gray undercoat.

Picking the Locks
Here I have pulled off a lock of the wool near the section that was close to my sheepy boy's head. It has lots of "VM", vegetable matter in it.

In this big set of locks, I have spotted two fat burrs. They'll come out right away.

A lock of Shetland wool typically is triangular-shaped. That's because Shetlands are a very, very old breed. Like other early sheep, they have a long outer coat with guard hairs, and then a fine, very soft undercoat. The outer coat is thinner, the inner coat thicker, and so produce the characteristic triangle shape.

Here's another view.

There are lots of ways to get the VM out. One of the most common is to comb it with very sharp combs. I am using one here. Or I can use a smaller, blunt-tined comb.

Once the locks have the worst of the VM out, they are ready to be washed, called scouring. In the case of this morning's scouring, the locks were so clean that I am scouring them without doing anything other than removing burrs and big stuff.

Scouring the Locks
Wool is scoured to remove the lanolin and sheepy sweat, called suint, plus other assorted potential contaminants. Dawn dish soap is a popular and inexpensive scouring agent. Sure, I could purchase special stuff, and perhaps even save some money that way, but Dawn is available at the grocery and we use it daily, so it's sensible for us.

Water is heated to too-hot-to touch, in goes a big blorp of soap, and then the locks are laid in gently so as not to agitate them and accidentally start the wool fibers felting together. They sit and marinate for about 15 minutes. Then the now yellowy-brown water is emptied out, and then there's another hot bath, and then another if needed.

In go the locks! Noah is home with a fever and heavy congestion. He cools off in the morning air.

A final bath for a few minutes in hot water with a blorp of distilled vinegar to neutralize the alkaline action of the soap, and then the locks are set to dry for a few days, either in front of a dehumidifier or in the sun, or both.

Teasing the Locks
Once the locks are dry, then it's time to get the rest of the hay and bits of dust out, preparatory to combing the wool to prepare it for spinning worsted-style. Worsted yarn requires a particular combing of the yarn and a style of spinning that makes it lustrous, dense, and smooth. But back to teasing.

Here is a lock of washed but very dirty Shetland. Now, many spinners would throw this lock away as too much a of a pain to bother with. Not me. This fleece is valuable, and what I have most of is time, not money. It's worth it to me to rescue such locks, to comb and pick out all of the VM.

If you look closely, you see the long guard hairs, a creamy color, at the top, then the short full undercoat, with the gray in it, at the bottom. When I comb, I hold it from the bottom, quite tightly, and comb it with a blunt comb. Then if needed, I flick -- lightly hit and pull -- the lock with a flicker comb, which in my case is a sensitive-skin cat comb.

Here is a much cleaner lock, creamy white, with the barest deeper cream at the tops. So lush! It won't need much teasing, but just enough to remove any bits that are left. The higher on the back of the fleece you go, the cleaner the fleece and its locks are.

Here is a little video showing how I prepare locks. It shows combing, not flicking.



This is what a lock looks like when its done. Like a slice of heaven, no? Soooo soft, so gentle, so lustrous.

In a blog post or two, we'll look at the final combing -- managed much the same way since the Middle Ages -- that turns the locks into "top", the soft and aligned length of fibers ready for the spinning wheel or spindle.

Picking, Combing, Carding, Spinning...Weaving: That's What's Happening

Working with wool and alpaca fiber recently.

The subtitle of this blog reads "and, of Course, the Occasional Side Trip". What I've been doing these past months qualifies as more than a little excursion, at this point.

I am hand-spinning wool and alpaca and getting ready to re-learn the art of harness weaving -- you know, a loom that goes "whish swish, whump thump" as you throw the shuttle and pull back on the beater to secure the just-made fabric.

The spinning was necessary; last fall I signed on once again at church to teach children to card and spin a little at this summer's Vacation Bible School. The summer before we'd had fun together but the spinning was execrable. So over months this spring I learned to handle a drop spindle decently and fell in love with what Amos Alden calls an "ancient and honorable craft". So ancient, in fact, it's wound up with pre-civilization.

One of the crop of pinky-red, yellow and fuzzy (!) toadstools
sprouting in our lawn after all the rain and fog.

Here we are, towards summer's end, and there are alpaca and sheep fleeces in the basement, bags of it in the garage -- fodder for another volunteer project -- fleece awaiting picking in a bowl, spindles and spinning wheel in the hallway, and a loom in the family room. They multiplied like the toadstools in our lawn after this summer's weeks of rain and dimness.

Not an excursion, then. Costuming? I've got a pretty beaded reticule on the way and a chintz 1770s anglaise on hold. No then, costuming's not going away. It just has to share space in the calendar and in the brain with work and family, volunteering and with wool picking, scouring, carding, combing, dizzing -- that doesn't mean spinning around until you fall over -- spinning and weaving scarves and warm alpaca blankets, and maybe, a linsey-woolsey petticoat? Let's see what happens.

Meanwhile, the last months unroll below in pictures. One fleece is worth ten thousand threads.

First there was the spinning wheel, a present for my grumumppieth birthday. Built in 1887 somewhere in Scandinavia, it traveled to North Carolina with immigrants and was held on to by their descendants until they unaccountably decided to part with it. A sort of faded reddish color, it's decorated with banding and painted designs in black. Rather chic, I think.

Circa 1887 Scandinavian spinning wheel.

Chic it might be, but it sat. Then I cleaned it and got everything smoothly turning, but it still sat. It's still sitting. I haven't learned to keep up with it!

Then there was the drop spindle that turned up at an antique show. It's from Eastern Europe, and I didn't know until recently that you're supposed to rest it on a surface to support it as it turns. Taking a class from a local professional, it was on this spindle I learned to spin in preparation for Vacation Bible School.

The Eastern European spindle. It has no notch on the pointed
top: you half hitch your yarn to hold it on.

Obligatory cute kitty shot.

Spinning!

Alpaca fleece arrived, part of the VBS project. Had to have lots of fleece ready for children to spin, plus more cleaned and ready to for them to try to card into cute little tubes, called "rolags", a Scotch term. So I learned to clean alpaca: to flick locks to remove bits of dust and hay, to roll rolags...

Second cute kitty shot. Muffin's sitting on the completed
rolags in the box. Can't blame her, they're soft.

Wanting to have wool for the VBS children to handle and card and spin too, because it's easier to work than slippery alpaca hair is, I bought a pretty Shetland sheep fleece from a lovely girl in Ohio. Lothlorien's whole fleece arrived in a box, smelling pleasantly and not too strongly of sheepy lanolin, and imbued with her personality. Here she is.

Lothlorien, the creamy Shetland in back.

Spinning practice went apace. I turned back to alpaca not long after the first lesson, heaven knows why, probably because I had so much of it. Wool fibers have lots of scales, and they have waves and crimps that makes them stretchy, resilient, and fibers stick together and are easy to spin. Alpaca has fewer scales per fiber, often has little crimp or curl and isn't stretchy, and so is slippery-ish and a bit harder to spin. Whatever. It's what I really learned on and I love how deliciously sooooooft it is.

Here is a lock from Tuesday, the alpaca whose hair I've been spinning. See his cute stripe? He's ticked!

Christopher holds up two balls of spun alpaca. They're for a scarf for him at Christmas.

Here's one of the balls. See all the fluffs on the edges? That's before washing, too. It "blooms" after being washed and is even fluffier.

Here's the yarn, plied from two strands, or "singles". So much terminology. Just like sewing.

I washed the plied yarn. It bloomed, all right. Big, chunky, fluffy, soft like Muffin's kitten would be.

Well, our VBS coordinator gave me some wool that was even easier for children to handle, some curly, long-locked Blue-faced Leicester. Sheep breeds have funny names. Do you see any blue on the face of the sheep below? The skin under the white wool on his face does have a bluish tint.

Hexham Champion, 2008, from Middle Dukesfield, in England.

So I learned to comb out the 6"-10" wool, purchasing long wickedly sharp combs, true weapons capable of really injuring somebody, at the Bluegrass Sheep and Fiber Festival in May.

The boys wanted to learn, so they got spindles, too. They're still learning, a little, as the fit takes them.

Can you see the snowball, erm, fleeceball, rolling?

At Vacation Bible School the campers handled wool and alpaca, carded and combed and spun it and two children took big balls of wool home, with hopes to buy a drop spindle and continue learning. Everyone else got an alpaca puff to pet and scare their parents with, plus a length of what they had made. Here we are on the first day of camp, learning about wool and other animal fibers.

Next day we carded and used those wicked combs to actually comb some lovely locks into fluff ready for spinning on the morrow.

The children spin. First I'd demonstrate, then they'd try it and try it again.

Here's Jenni from Living with Jane. She helped children make jewelry, do glass mosaics, and felting.

The children actually span -- the obsolete past perfect tense of "spun"? -- quite a bit of yarn, not all of which was given away. We built a yarn winder from Tinkertoys to put it in a skein so it could be washed again to finish it.

The yarn winder. Spin the cross-shaped piece and it goes around.

Completed skein. The yarn thickness varies a lot. Children
just learning made it, and it has charm.

Well, we wanted to use it, and the boys and I were interested in how a loom works, so I read up in library books and online, and we built a rudimentary two-harness counterbalance loom, invented eons ago. Versions of this loom were used in India to make the incomparably fine muslins exported to Europe in the late 18th century, just in time for Classicism and the Regency. Versions called drawlooms made figured silks, and European weavers produced the luscious gold-and-silver thread enhanced, flower-bedecked brocades that we all sigh over.

Here's the Tinkertoy loom, with a red cotton warp on it, ready to be woven with the weft, made of the child-spun wool you saw above. That's a cardboard "stick" shuttle.

Yes, it works. Those two rectangular-shaped things decked with
strings (heddles) and hung from the top bar (castle) are called
harnesses.

At VBS the owner of Rosie's Ponies and Petting Zoo and I got to talking about the friendly llamas and sheep she had brought for the children to admire, pet, and feed, and she kindly offered the animal's fleeces when I asked if she might sell some, since she didn't use them. I got to thinking and in a spark of what I like to think is grace, it seemed that the fleeces could be turned into warm things for those in our area who need them. Thus was born the Big Fleece Project. It's still in infancy, but we hope to have felt and yarn from the fleeces to use.

One day recently the boys and I visited their farm, petted an affectionate (!) camel, a cozy-stand-next-to-you pony, admired llamas, petted rare Soay sheep, and packed up fleece after fleece that had been sheared. The back of the SUV was filled to the roof with fleeces stuffed into bags.

We brought them home, and that evening and the next morning, sorted them, skirted the sheep fleeces, a fancy term for taking off the edges, which are usually encrusted with matted, dungified, muddy, weedy bits. You see, a shearer cuts the fleece off sheep such that it's in once piece, ideally. He starts on the tummy one one hind leg and works round to the back and ends with the other hind leg. WikiHow explains.

Not all the fleeces were usable, but many were, and they were draped everywhere, drying out before being bagged.

Remember VBS? Here's the petting zoo day. Look at Mr. Llama and his buddy behind him, craning for affection and some treats. See if you can match his fleece in the piles below. I think I recognize some of the sheepy fleece, too.

Llama fleeces fall apart easily, so they're in bits: chocolate brown, cinnamon, latte, silver mist, cream, and agouti. They're my names. Must be hungry right now. Oh, so soft.

Llama, llama everywhere.

One Shetland fleece and lots of mystery short-staple (length of the wool) wool, a bit overpowering due to being damp. My mother was not terribly impressed on first contact with the project.

Sheep fleeces, entire, drying the only super-sunny, dry place I could think of,
the back of the truck.

"Black sheep, black sheep, have you any wool?" We ended with eleven bags full.

Soccer and fleece. They go together. Right?

In the last week or two I've almost completed spinning yarn for Christopher's scarf, and am starting to clean another Shetland fleece. In a post or two, how that's done. Oh, and the new loom, and not a Tinkertoy one.

Meantime, it'll be back to the Journal Journey!