Day 18

I remembered to blog before turning this off and going to bed!  Yay!

Today will be pictures again.  I thought I'd do some posts about the spinning class I took at Heindselman's in March, and I'll start off with what we had to do for our "homework"--picking and washing the wool.  We were each given a grocery bag full of raw fleece from a sheep at the end of our first lesson, and we were to take it home, pick as much vegetation out by hand as we could, and then wash it.  Picking out the plant stuff was a little icky at first, because it turns your hands positively black from the dirt the sheep picked up wandering around for months without a shower, and the natural lanolin of the fiber.  It smelled a little, too, but my hands were soft after doing it and the dirt washed right off with no problem, probably because of the lanolin. 

(I don't have any pictures of the raw wool, so I'll link here, but keep in mind that the wool I had was much dirtier than the picture at that link!)


After picking it, I had to wash it in hot water.  The trick to washing raw fiber without felting it is to NOT AGITATE it.  There are natural barbs on the individual hairs, and if you agitate it (sometimes called fulling), the barbs hook to each other.  This is why you never wash your wool sweaters in the washer with the towels unless they've been pretreated somehow.  I filled up my bathroom sink with hot water (the plug for the kitchen sink didn't work right), put some wool in, and GENTLY pressed down until it was saturated.  I let it soak for a while, then came back, rinsed it, and filled up the sink again.  I did this until the wool was almost white and then laid it out to dry.

First soaking.  The water was darker than it looks here.

Second soaking.

Third soaking.

Last soaking.

Gently squeezed dry.  You can see some of the vegetation still--it's nearly impossible to get it all out by hand-picking, so you figure most of the rest of it will come out as it's carded and spun.

When the wool was completely dry, which took a few days, I put it back in the grocery bag and took it to my next class, where we learned how to card it and make rolags.

Lumpily laid out and ready to dry.