Okay – in my previous post, I talked about wanting to spin my yarn using woolen techniques. I’ll put together a post to explain the difference between woolen vs. worsted in the future… but the short story is that when you are spinning a woolen yarn, the fiber doesn’t need to be strictly aligned. A woolen yarn has lots of air and is kind of… puffy? If that makes sense? When spinning a woolen yarn, you typically spin from the cloud, from the fold, or with carded fibers. Because the fibers can be in any which direction, you don’t have to be super fussy about prepping it.
So, after saying all that… I was super fussy about the way I prepped and washed this fiber. Why? Because I could!
This Romeldale fleece had a beautiful lock structure and was superrrrr greasy. I started working on this fleece in May 2019. To prep the wool for washing, I laid it out on a sheet and started sorting the wool. I picked out pieces that had too much vegetable matter (or, VM) and other, uh, goodies and separated the rest into locks that I could keep together and wool that didn’t maintain the lock structure.
When you spin a woolen yarn, you really don’t need to maintain the lock structure. However, I had never prepped fiber that way before and I wanted to try it. I bundled together groups of locks using rubber bands, then washed them using a separated lingerie bag. This is one of my favorite tools to use while washing fibers – and you can pick them up in the grocery store 🙂
When I say the fleece was greasy, that means it has lots of lanolin. Lanolin is a natural wax that is secreted by sheep skin. It helps keep the sheep wool and skin waterproof and healthy. It’s 100% okay for your skin and is actually extracted from wool to create skincare products. Washing a fleece removes the lanolin from the wool so you can work with it – whether you are spinning or felting or using it as insulation. You don’t want to remove all of the lanolin from a fleece – some people even skip washing to “spin in the grease.” Working with this particular fleece made my hands soooo soft.
When washing a fleece, you should expect to lose 25%-50% of the weight in washing. You remove the vegetable matter and removing the lanolin reduces the weight quite a bit, as well. If you don’t have a high-quality fleece, you may also lose some fiber when you prep it due to broken and weak tips.
Just a quick note – if you aren’t trying to maintain lock structure, you can do a little bit of extra prep to make sure your fleece gets clean and is easier to card. Basically, you want to open up the fleece as much as possible and there are a couple of ways to do this. 1. You can run it through a “picker” which is like a giant medieval torture device. 2. You can “flick” the ends to open them up. 3. You can pull the wool apart using just your hands. 4. I’m sure there are more ways to do this, these are the three I know off the top of my head!
Kt’s Method for Washing Fleece
- Put the fiber into lingerie bags.
- Cold soak: I throw the fiber into a cold water soak overnight. I try to do this all at once, in a big rubber storage bin. This removes a lot of the dirt (and any residual poo).
- Hot scour: I fill a bucket with hot water (as hot as my skin can handle) and add scour (according to directions). I put in the fiber and let it sit for 15-30 minutes, dump the water, then squeeze out the excess water from the fiber.
- Hot rinse: Refill the bucket with hot water (as hot as my skin can handle). I put in the fiber and let it sit for 15-30 minutes, dump the water, then squeeze out the excess water from the fiber.
- If your fleece is very greasy, repeat steps 3-4 1 to 2 more times.
- Repeat the hot rinse one more time.
- Throw your lingerie bags into a top-loading washing machine on a spin cycle (you can also put small amounts of wool into a salad spinner).
- Leave the fiber out to dry. I usually put it in a hanging mesh herb drying rack outdoors, but if it’s cold or rainy, I will put it up indoors with a fan blowing on it.
Kt’s Tips and Tricks for Washing Fleece
- You’ll notice that I go from a big tub to a bucket – this is because it’s easier to fill a bucket with hot water and a lot easier to move it around! This does mean you can’t wash a fleece all at one time (unless it’s a small one) and you’ll need to do 3+ loads.
- I use biodegradable scour and flush the water down the toilet. I used to dump it in our backyard, but my new house doesn’t have a backyard!
- Original Dawn detergent is a popular choice for scour, but I’ve been using Kookaburra.
- I talk about using hot water – I just use hot water straight out of the tap nowadays. In our previous house, the hot water never got that hot, so I would use an electric kettle or boil water on the stove to get the water up to temperature. I try to use water that is almost too hot to put my hand in – but you want to use water that is at least 140 degrees to melt the lanolin.
- To avoid felting, DO NOT agitate!!! Ever!!!
- To avoid felting, you can move from cold water to hot water, but you can’t go from hot water to cold water. That’s why my rinse baths are all hot.
Check out some process photos and photos of the washed fleece.
Spoiler alert: I only did the scour step once for this very greasy fleece. By the time I came back to start spinning this wool, it was too sticky to use! But we’ll come back to this in a later post 🙂
