A year ago, knowing pretty much nothing about skirting or scouring a sheep’s fleece, I found out through the local weaver’s and spinner’s guild that I had just joined that a local shepherd had some fleeces available. Having just started spinning a scant few months before, I was curious and up for the adventure.
Turns out the shepherd was pretty new to the world of sheep fleeces too. Her family had raised sheep for meat but she had just acquired a small flock of Blue Leicester sheep and had had them shorn for the first time. I chose a lamb’s fleece, for no other reason except “oh lambs!” and it was smaller and therefore slightly less expensive.
I found out later that lamb’s wool is maybe not the best place for a beginner, because they tend to have a shorter staple (lock length) than older sheep and something called “milk tips” that makes the outside end of the lock more prone to breakage. I also wonder, with a bit of experience behind me, if the person who had shorn this lamb was very experienced, as there did seem to be a lot of second cuts and it did not appear to be very well skirted. (Skirting is the process of pulling out the dirtiest and least usable locks, and second cuts make for short and messy staples.) But, it was a good practice fleece and I learned a lot!
My idea at the time was to scour and spin (on a spindle, because I had not even acquired my first wheel at this point) enough yarn to knit a hat or pair of mittens. I never did end up with the mittens, but I learned a LOT along the way.
The shepherd shared this photo of their flock and was kind enough to explain that “my” lamb did not have a name like Shaun the Sheep or Gwendolyn or Ollie (all excellent sheep names, IMHO) but something like Hollowdowne Lass 57K. The first part of the name comes from the breeding farm, then an ID number, and the letter indicates the year of birth and is her tattoo letter. In Canada, any breed of animal that uses tattoos follows the same letter pattern, so 2022 was K, 2023 is L, 2024 will be M and so forth. (I have fictionalized the Hollowdowne part – I don’t know if this is a privacy issue, but don’t have permission from the shepherd to share the actual registered name of the sheep so I made one up following the formula.)
I am such an inexperienced city girl that I even thought the feed bag that the fleece came in had a cool sort of farmcore vibe to it. Before I dumped it out, I spread a tarp across the kitchen floor. This had been intended as a porch project, but a year ago the air quality was so bad due to wildfire smoke that I moved the project inside. I weighed it with the idea that I’d weigh the fresh-from-the-farm fleece and then weigh the finished yarn and see how much was lost. A year later, though, I have picked through the fleece so unevenly, scouring some and using it for various wool and felt and even garden projects, that this weighing soon became entirely irrelevant. But, it does show that I started with about 1.9 kg (maybe 4.5ish lbs?) of raw fleece.
The first step in processing raw wool, the internet helpfully explained, is to pick out the icky bits. Poop, clods of mud, hay and straw and other plant matter (known as “VM” for vegetable matter by those who know about these things) and at least one dead ladybug all need to be brushed or pried out. I am a bit of a priss and don’t generally like getting my hands dirty, but I found this skirting process to be quite soothing. For everything except my back. Next time, I’m definitely doing this on a proper skirting table and not sitting on the hard kitchen floor. You might notice our kitten Percy inspecting the process from a safe perch.
I’d been serious about knitting for about 4 years when I started this endeavour, and felt fairly knowledgeable about wool. I’d been spinning for a scant few months, but I’ve always been voraciously curious, and the internet is full of tips and tutorials. I found this one from WoolMaven to be particularly helpful. I really had no idea what I was doing, but loved the tactile-ness of working with the raw wool.
Even with the resources of the internet at my disposal, it was not entirely clear to me which bits should be salvaged and would come clean through the scouring process and which should just be tossed. Having nearly 2 kg to work with, I just hived off the very worst looking bits into one pile and plucked some of the cleanest and most promising-looking parts for the next step. Then I wrapped what was left over (most of it!) back up into the feed bag for another day. Later in the summer, I revisited it and took another good chunk out to scour, and I still have probably half of the original amount left over, still wrapped tightly in the feed bag, waiting in the garage. Did you know dirty wool makes for great compost in the garden? And the birds can use it to line their nests, too.
I was fascinated by the raw wool. Border Leicesters are knows for their crimpy locks, which make a strong and durable but not incredibly soft yarn. Raw wool is coated in lanolin, a sort of waxy substance that helps keep the fleece waterproof. Some spinners prefer to spin wool “in the grease,” meaning without having removed the lanolin, but I wanted to see if I could clean it out a bit. There is some debate in the spinning and knitting community as to whether spinning in the grease makes yarn that makes end products like mittens and hats warmer and more water resistant. Much as I loved the rich, earthy smell of the raw wool (as clearly Bella the dog also enjoyed) my family was less enamoured with the scent pervading the kitchen.
The scouring process begins by submersing the wool carefully, without agitating it at all, into soapy water. You’ll see I put about 50g worth into a lingerie bag while I scoured mine. Many on the internet suggest Dawn dish soap, which I find works on just about any kind of stain. Except in this case, I forgot to add the soap. Also, I learned using too big of a bin (blue one) wastes hot water and is too heavy to lift myself. I switched to the smaller bin and it was much more efficient for the second wash and rinses. If I recall, I moved this through one hot water soak, one hot water with soap soak, and a final hot water standing rinse.
The most important thing through this process is to avoid felting the wool, which can happen through temperature shocks (eg following a hot soak with a cold rinse) or if you agitate the wool while it is wet. Felting means the tiny scales on each wool fibre grip each other, often shrinking the fibre, and making it useless for spinning. Ironically, shortly after this scouring process I learned that I love needle-felting and wet-felting even more than spinning, so in fact set out to felt a lot of this wool after the fact, but I did manage to avoid felting it in the scouring process.
Not shown, me swinging the dripping lingerie bag over my head like a lasso to get the residual moisture out of it before I hung it out on the laundry line for a warm sunny afternoon to dry.
Being relatively new at this, I had a hard time deciding whether this was clean or not. You can see the white locks are quite a bit lighter than they were before scouring, but there are more visible yellow patches. I asked around as to whether these are the dreaded canary yellow marks, which are indicators of weak or stressed wool, but I was assured that’s just natural colour variation. And you can really see a lot of the remaining VM (vegetable matter) that doesn’t come out in the scouring process. You need to flick that out manually, an experience I’ll share in a later post. It also had less lanolin, but I’m not convinced it had none.
This was about an afternoon of effort, and I loved it end to end even though I really did not know what I was doing. I learned a lot for next time, mostly that a cheap skirting table would have saved me a lot of effort and cleanup, and to be less precious and worried about the whole process. I am still not really sure about the potential canary stains or whether I had a quality fleece to begin with, but I’ve enjoyed exploring the process with it. If you’re thinking of acquiring a fleece to try the scouring process, I’d recommend you go ahead – it was a fairly straightforward and enjoyable adventure, even for a beginner like me.