#fiber processing

1. Drown it

2. Beat the shit out of it

3. Smack the shit out of it

4. Stab it the shit out of it

5. step 4 but with a new tool

And boom, now you have raw linen

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.

Are we interested in a spring/autumn exchange before the Tour?

I think it would be fun to swap scoured but otherwise unprocessed wool from different parts of the country and the world… All breeds welcome, but obvi we all love something we haven't tried before. ☺️

like a cookie exchange: everybody provides a single bump for everyone else (thinking in the 100g range), then everybody receives a bump from all participants. limited to like ten or twelve participants (if we can even find that many).

this is a trust exercise: definitely the sort of thing we'd need to self-manage and track, and sharing your address to a private mailing list would be the default. I'd probably make a spreadsheet with addresses and tracking numbers, and do a little dance in the rain to keep from getting burned. ☺️

I mentioned spring/fall because I don't mind international postage to the South, but I understand some people might want a domestic swap and I wanted to be clear.

If this all sounds like WAY TOO MUCH (tm), would anyone be interested in a scoured wool swap with just me? I am shipping from Oregon (Pacific Northwest in the US). I have several fleeces and will be scouring once the sunshine is here to stay (probably mid-May).

oh nice ! I have never tried raspberry but I harvested a bunch of blackberry bast fiber a few years ago. I may have been harvesting too late in the season or maybe I needed better tools than what I had, but what i found was that I couldnt spin the fiber or make cordage out of it. it did make lovely fiber for basketry though. Raspberry may be a little better suited (ive noticed raspberry canes are usually thinner and bendier than the blackberry we have here)...not sure.

I would definitely recommend starting to harvest some canes early in the season to find the sweet spot of when the bast fiber is strong enough to use but not so strong it becomes woody. I would also recommend having some good tools ! Flax processing tools such as a hackle would be good. Processing plants for bast fiber is a lot more work than processing wool for spinning !

...mistakes were made...

Now I need to compose myself and finish these rose bud project batts (I hate this project now. It's probably a mix of "I don't even wear these colors what the heck am I supposed to knit after I'm done" and "why is making batts on a drum carder so fucking annoying" and "the drum carder already annoyed me why do I have to do that annoying thing SO MUCH! (This project is around 8 Batts total, I think, save me)

BUT @swords-n-spindles my beloved is willig to take this project off my hands! So now I only have to finish the Batts (only two are left and one of these two is already 1/3 done) and then I can dive into projects that spark joy !

Bonus pic of my sticks

I mayyyy have made an unwise decision at a local fiber fest 😳 I got a whole alpaca fleece. There's so many beautiful colors in here! From just one guy! (his name is Nacho, as seen in the poster). It's been skirted, but not washed. and it's SO SOFT.

I've processed sheep fleeces as a kid and I know that I don't have the space or energy to scour and wash as an adult. So I thought maybe alpaca would be better since it doesn't have any lanolin? The person at the booth mentioned that people even spin alpaca raw sometimes. Sooo that's what I'll be doing. I'll wash it after I've spun it.

I bought this without owning any fiber processing tools and it turns out they're incredibly expensive? I should have guessed that's why we never got any for 4H as a kid. Dog combs don't have a high enough TPI density for processing alpaca well and with their tiny surface area, doing all of this would take me years. I'm going to have fun figuring this out (: Also planning on shaking out as much dust as I can before I start spinning. I know alpaca's like their dust baths. Trying to decide if I should wear a mask while I'm spinning it, I am anytime I handle the raw fiber so far. (I'm very allergic to dust)

I've also only spun alpaca once and it was not the greatest experience. It was "blended" with wool, but it was more like two pieces of top held next to each other and it was difficult trying to get them to actually hold together in the spin. The alpaca was slippery and the wool was not. So I'm a little nervous about this. I did buy some cormo to blend with it. somehow. in hopes that it will add more elasticity to the alpaca.

Find the locks

Flick them open

Wrap them in netting to wash

Try not to injure yourself while combing

Pull off some nests

Spin it really fine

Make it a two ply

And then you can knit a ring shawl