Skirting is the process of removing the yucky wool off the fleece before washing and carding the fleece. What I love best about these pictures is that they carefully conceal the inexperience and bewilderment we felt when faced with the fleece. When looking up skirting tutorials it seems pretty straightforward: you remove burred, matted, or pooped on wool mostly from the belly, legs, and tail. Easy, right? The first problem we had was locating which parts of the fleece were which. There were many conversations that went along these lines, “Okay, if THAT is a leg, than this has to be the tail area?” “Wait! What if that is actually the neck and this is a leg?” Etc. Nothing could have made us feel more like sheep beginners than not being sure what we were even looking at. Then came the next dilemma. What to remove? What stays? How much do you take off? Which parts are just dirty, and which parts are matted? Each question was punctuated by running back to look at youtube videos, none of which seemed to help us when faced with our own fleece. In the end we just dove in and took off sections. Was it enough? Was it too much? I’m sure in a few years we will look back and laugh at how little we knew this year, but for now, we took a deep breathe, got to work, and pretended we knew what was happening. One thing for sure: This year we will put coats on the sheep!
