fleece scouring

Last summer we went on a day course from the woolly shepherd on how to process your fleece. We learnt how to scour (wash) the fleece, dye it, card it and peg loom it. We also had a go with drop spindles and a spinning wheel.  It was a lot of fun, and also very handy as we had these three lovely white fleeces from our Devon Closewool ewes, and not a clue how even to store them.. nevermind the rest.  We stashed the fleeces in a shed and said we would process the wool once the winter months came, the rayburn lit giving us plenty of hot water and all that time on our hands. I really don’t know what became of all that time.

Suddenly, we had a sunny day, and I realised the long nights and plentiful hot water would not be with us forever, and so yesterday we had a go at scouring some fleece.  We decided to start on the black fleece we had been given, in case we mess up and turned it into a block of felt!

This black fleece was offered to us by another small holder.  Unless its something special its very hard to get rid of coloured fleeces, in fact there is very little money in nice white fluffy fleeces. I said yes.. figured we could practice on it.  It turns out its not black, but half grey and half brown.. sort of the same colour as what you find in the dyson…

Remembering what we could from the course, and a little info in the handy booklet ’spin it’ , we filled up two bowls of hot water.. as hot as we could put our hands in comfortably. Shook in some washing soda and a squirt of washing up liquid, and in went a chunk of fleece.  Out came a surprising amount of gunk.. changed the water.. rinse.. no agitating (not trying to make felt!) into pillow case and into the washing machine for the spin cycle.  Out on the rack after that.. and its surprisingly nice and soft and not felt like!  Still the colour of the inside of the vacuum though.. We shall continue and then move on to our own fleeces. 

after that? well how hard can spinning be! (ok very hard…)