#fibre processing

Some absolutely beautiful tools arrived late last week. The double pitch combs & hackle were custom made for me by Celestial Farms to mach a set of hand carders & small hackle I already had from them. The flicker brush is also from Celestial Farms, bought as a premade from their etsy store.

the most helpful boys in the world were very interested in what we were doing, and frankly far less suspicious of the large tub of water than i would've preferred for them to be.

anyhow, about a kilo of fleece got dumped into the tub and arranged to be as aligned as possible. in future washes, i didn't bother with this and didn't find that there was much a difference, and certainly not sufficient difference to justify the time and effort spent carefully laying it out.

i imagine that this is different if you're washing a whole fleece and things are already more or less aligned. if you're washing a bag of of fleece that's just been plopped into the bag, i would suggest not bothering.

the small bag at the end were some locks that we'd picked ahead of time to see if they washed up nicer. (spoiler: they did not.)

worth noting is that we have one of those bathtubs that's short but deep, so this isn't as much water or space as it looks like.

if you've ever wanted to see how water-resistant wool is, here's a great example. these photos were taken the next morning, and some of the fibre was still totally dry, despite having carefully pushed it all underwater before we headed to bed.

after about twelve hours of soaking, this is what we had—the water doesn't look that dirty in the second photo, but you can just barely see a cloud of dirt at the edge of the mesh bag we were using to hold the wool in place in the tub. (it was just laid on the bottom of the tub, and meant that we could easily move the wool up or down the tub, or lift it out entirely, without having to move it much.)

anyhow, soaking water from this batch went into a bucket to feed my wife's plants. (and then the next batch i fucked up and drained it. 🤡 it's amazing they put up with me, tbh.)

wool got moved safely away from the water, and then it was time for the hottest tap water we could manage. our tap runs at well over 60c/145f, so we didn't bother to try to make it any warmer. as it was, i was very grateful that we'd bought the extra heavy duty kitchen gloves.

we added a couple splurts of dishsoap (palmolive) to the tub, then carefully let the fleece spread itself out again, which doesn't take much encouragement, thankfully. and then we fucked off for a while.

twenty minutes later, the water looked like this.

my hand's in the water to about my knuckles in that photo, and as you may notice, it very much appears that i have no fingers.

second wash. our friend the very large mesh laundry bag helped hold the fleece first away from the drain, and then from the tap, and we did it again just like the first wash.

another twenty minutes, and we had this.

you can almost believe that i've got fingers! progress!

this post offers a great look at what it looks like when lanolin is leaving a fleece. we have incredibly soft water, so most of their findings weren't especially relevant to our washing, but the visual guide is fantastic, especially since it took them so many changes to get things clean.

so again, drained, refilled, and resoaped, then left to sit for twenty minutes. and this time, i came back to this!

a whole entire hand! fingertips and everything! i was sort of surprised, honestly, since fine wools have a reputation for being really lanolin heavy, but after this batch of fleece i went down to two washes, and feel like it was more than sufficient for 90% of it. (there was a chunk of merino/bond cross in a later batch that was a little shorter and more lanolin heavy, and likely could've used a third wash, but i'm using that to make rolags and it's going fine, so whatever.)

anyhow, fleece clean! rinse time!

this looks like fleece in water, because that's what it is. we did two rinses, and that seemed plenty sufficient to get out all the suds.

next we spread it out as gently as possible onto a cheap sweater drying rack and hung it on a giant screw that's sort of inexplicably sticking sharp-end-out of the eaves of our porch. (and you'd be like 'that sounds normal, lots of people have screws or whatever to hang things,' to which i'd say 'it does! except that there are three of them and the placement is utterly bizarre, and this is the only one that you can hang anything from.' my best guess is christmas lights, but why a screw? why sharp side out? how sharp side out, at that?)

wool, drying! and the hated roses that have been blooming all fucking winter and are continuing to bloom and are getting bigger and now have spawned more roses somehow, and now we have a bunch of red roses, too. when we moved into this place a year and a half ago there were only white roses. we don't know where the red ones came from, nor do we know why the roses are suddenly VERY TALL—see how in this photo, they don't even clear the top of the wall? now they're like 50cm over it. eighteen inches over it. why. i hate them.

i will continue to hate them unless they become tall enough and self-support enough that they accidentally shade our office, in which case i will hate them slightly less but i'll be mad about it.

and now we're done! that's a lock of nice clean wool! all we did before this photo was fluff out the tips a bit.

i combed some out, and it's pretty good!

nice little nests of combed top. the wool's slightly different colours because, like i said, it wasn't a fleece, it was just fleece, if that makes sense, so there's a bit of a range of colouration in there. but there's much less loss than i'd expected, even combing it out, and all up this was a much easier and less miserable process than i'd feared it would be!

i've put off buying raw fleece for a long time, partly because i've mostly lived in apartments and haven't had a ton of space in which to wash it, and partly because i'm disabled and was afraid that doing it would be too much physically, but it turns out that i probably could have done this a lot sooner, and also that it's not really that hard on the body. the worst of it for me was bending over the tub to fill/refill and then get the wool onto the drying screen, which was a little rough, but definitely not so rough i wouldn't do it again.

(we then did this several more times to get all the fleece washed, and i can already tell you: we're gonna do it again.)

I did my first tries in processing raw fibres the day before yesterday.

do you tend to pick the wool before washing it, or do you just skirt aggressively and hope for the best?

I acquired three fleeces! This is the smallest one and it is as tall as me!