Shearing and Cleaning Fleece

I am SOOO happy to be able to finally post again!  After years of struggling with the pain and frustration of dial-up Internet, we now have satellite Internet.  Yay!!  I can finally see to it that this little blog gets updated on a normal basis!  So anyways, a lot has been going on since the last post!  Spring has certainly sprung around here and then some.  I had promised to post some photos of our sheep.  I thought it would be nice to post some pictures and give a little tutorial of the shearing and wool preparation process.  A lot goes into getting fleece and fiber ready to spin into yarn!  Here they are, Razel is the dark sheep and Gandalf is the white.  Kaya the goat is also here.

  

So, when the time comes to shear, the sheep are literally set on their backsides like they would be sitting on a chair.  For whatever reason, this position makes the sheep really passive and it doesn't hurt them at all.  The shearer is then able to run the clippers along the sheep in a way that keeps the fleece in essentially one piece.  Well, a good shearer does this.  I am happy to say that mine does! Below you can see what I mean by the sitting position.  Razel's head is tucked under his arm while he runs the clippers down her side.

 

Look how much smaller they look after they've been clipped!  Lincolns produce so much long, beautiful, lustrous fleece.  They look so tiny once they loose it all.

 

Here is my daughter Willow sitting on the sheets that are full of wool.  One for each sheep!  She was so excited to come and "help" shear the sheep.  At this point the wool is ready to be washed and prepped for dying and combing/carding for the spinning wheel.

To get the fleece ready to wash, you first need to "skirt" it and remove any unusable parts.  Manure tags, excessive vegetation, and extremely stained areas (urine) are removed.  You can see what I was talking about when I said that a good shearer will remove the fleece in one big piece.  In the picture below, the wool on the top of the sheet is from her neck and the bottom of the was her backside.  It's like it was peeled off of her.  Oh, and just to point out, that's quite a large sheet and the fleece almost covered it.  That's a lot of wool!!

I sit and start picking out the bad bits while the fleece is still on the sheet.  A nice warm sunny day is great for this!  Here my son Ronan wanted to be a part of it all while I was working on Gandalf's fleece.

Once I've picked out the really big and nasty bits I put the fleece onto a wool rack to really start going over it to get as much vegetable matter out as I possibly can.  This can take a while and be quite tedious, but it's really important.  I had to split the fleeces into two parts to do this because there was so much wool on these sheep!

Once it's been picked over as good as you can get while keeping your sanity, it's time to wash!  This is were one really does realize how DIRTY sheep get.  I use my top-loading washing machine for this process.  First you need to fill the machine with VERY HOT water, just hotter than your hands can take.  Turn off your machine.  You then add the detergent.  I use the original Dawn blue dish liquid.  Many experienced wool workers told me this was the best and it did work wonderfully! Now the amount to use seems to very from one person you ask to another.  I use one tablespoon of detergent for every 8oz. of fleece.  Now you're ready to add your wool.  You very gently submerge the wool into the hot soapy water.  Again, make sure that you have turned the machine off before you walk away!!!!  You want no agitation whatsoever or you'll end up with a big felt doughnut of wool.  For those of you that don't work with wool too much or at all, animal fiber (wool)+ hot, soapy water + aggitation = felt!!  There are times in knitting and crochet when this is wanted, but not when you're trying to wash wool.

After about 60 minutes it's time to drain and spin out the wool.  Turn the washer dial to your spin cycle and just let it do it's thing.  Make sure you've turned off any extra rinse cycles.  You will see a flood of nasty dirty water drain into your sink.  This whole process will be repeated two more times.

Once you've gotten through the three wash cycles you'll need to put the fleece through three rinse cycles.  This is done the exact same way as washing, but you use cool water and no detergent.  I also add one cup of vinegar to the first two rinse cycles to help break up the detergent.  You want the water to run clear on the last rinse cycle.  If you need an extra rinse, then do an extra rinse.  Get all the detergent out.  At this point you gently take the wool out of the machine and lay it out to dry.  You should now have nice clean wool.  From here you can apply dye or comb/card it for spinning.  Some like to dye before they spin, some after.  Here is Razel's wool after it's been washed and dried.  It's a lovely silvery-gray with naturally brown tips.  So pretty!

Oh, and remember when I said that Lincoln sheep have long locks of wool?  Well, here is a lock of Razel's wool next to a normal butter knife....

So to sum all this up, getting wool ready for the spinning wheel takes a bit of work and preparation, but it really is worth the effort.  Someday as we continue to expand, I may get to the point that I have to send the fleece off to be washed and prepared, but for now it really is rewarding to do it myself.  Next, I'll show you how I am able to use food colors and Kool-Aide (yes, Kool-Aide!!)  to dye the wool beautiful colors!