washing and processing a new fleece

 I've been washing fleeces.   This one is likely a BFL/Shetland cross.   It's about a 3-31/2 inch staple length.  There is a bit of VM, which is to be expected since the sheep are kept outside all the time.  The worst VM I've ever found came from sheep who were kept in a barn almost all the time.  It was just loaded to the point of almost being unusable, especially when combined with the excess lanolin produced from being sheltered all the time.   

This fleece was easily cleaned. I put portions of the fleece into lingerie bags. I used my laundry tub to soak, with no agitation for any of the soaks or washes.   I used a warm water soak to remove a lot of the actual dirt.  Then I used a hot water wash with Orvus paste and Zep degreaser, which removed most of the lanolin.  The second wash was just Orvus and a tiny squirt of Dawn dish soap in hot water.  It needed 2 or 3 soaks in decreasing temperatures of hot water.  As the water cooled down during the process, I used the next water bath at a similar water temperature as the previous one had as I drained it.   Since the two factors for felting wool are agitation and abrupt changes in temperature, this would hopefully stop that from happening.

I tried a batch in the drum carder, but didn't like the results.   The VM doesn't generally fall out in a drum carder, usually does when spinning.  What I had missed was that this fleece was a bit tippy, meaning the tips were weak and were either a bit felted or they just broke off when processing, and there was a bit of a short undercoat and some felted cut ends.  These caused a lot of neps to be formed in the drum carded batts.   I tried combing with Valkerie viking combs, which produced a stellar result but about 25% waste, which is pretty normal.  The problem that I found though was that required a lot of arm strength with the felted tips and cut ends.  I ended up flick carding the locks and turning them into rolags, which resulted in minimum waste and a lovely, spinnable rolag.  It's still a lot of work though.

I learned something.   I'd been taught early on that flick carders work best using a tapping motion to create static electricity, which opens the lock and lets the VM drop out.  This technique works exceptionally well, and doesn't take a lot of effort since it's just a gentle tap, tap that's needed.  However, this works until it doesn't.  With the weak tips and the bit of felting at the ends, that brushing that I've always warned people not to do, is totally required here.  The tips need more effort than the tapping allows for and the felting at the cut end, despite being really slight, doesn't respond at all to the tapping.  This means that I was tapping away and accomplishing absolutely nothing!  So I resulted to a mixture of brushing the tips and then tapping.   Takes more time and much more effort but I was able to get those beautiful rolags that I like to spin.   It's going to take me forever to process this fleece at this rate.

Now if only I had labelled the lingerie bags that I'd used to wash the 2 white fleeces in.   They are all the same bag, as in the same colour, the same size, the same everything and when filled with white fleece, yup, they look all the same.