I've been washing Jazz's fleece. It has been so much fun! Jazz is a Shetland sheep, and her fleece is double coated. What is really cool is that the outer coat is black, and the under coat is silver. When you pull gently on the long black outer wool and the shorter silver under wool they come apart like magic. At least they react this way after the fleece is washed and dried. I am amazed at the difference between the two coats from the same sheep. They will both be used, but for different purposes. The black is coarser than the silver.
I washed a small part of the fleece earlier and it's dry. I've been playing with that so far, but tonight I put the rest of the fleece into a bath of hot water and EcoScour. After about 2 hours, I pulled out the wet wool and put it in a mesh bag so I could drain the lanolin, dirt, and water outside (we have a septic tank that I didn't want full of lanolin). I rinsed the fleece twice in the washing machine without agitating it, and ran it through the spin cycle both times. This is the first time I've tried the washing machine technique, and I really like it. The wool is so much further along on the drying with the water spun out of it. I think it's overall cleaner too for getting the rinse water spun out so well. Now to let it dry so I can separate the two coats.
This is really more fun than I expected! Now to figure out what special projects each of these coats will be made into :-)
2 comments:
I bet the coarser darker coat would make a lovely pair of socks :) Thats so neat, that you get 2 coats out of the same sheep. The more I read your blog, the more I want to try my own hand at fleece side of fiber. I should try and get myself a drop spindle. There are a few ladies in my columbus moms forum who do their own spinning and dying, I bet they could help me out if I needed someone to show me what to do in person :)
Whoosh! Another body, sucked into the Spinning Vortex! Haha!
You'd be great at it Stacy. It's a lot of fun to see the fibers drafted into strands of yarn and plied together. I know Rowan already loves to spin :-)
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