The sack arrives in spring, usually, and it smells of lanolin, dust and dry grass. Inside is a year of one sheep's life, plus a fair amount of the field it lived in. Over the following weeks that fleece will be sorted, washed, opened, spun and dyed, and it will end up as a skein you can hang on a peg and hold against the light. None of the steps are complicated. Each one asks for patience and a willingness to work with what the animal actually gave you rather than what you had in mind.
Reading the Fleece Before You Wash It
Resist the urge to throw the whole sack in the bath. Spread the fleece out first, ideally on a mesh-topped table or an old pallet covered with netting, somewhere with good daylight and a breeze. This is skirting: you are removing the parts that will never spin well and keeping the blanket, the sheet of wool that ran along the back and sides.
Work lock by lock. Shake out the loose dust, pull off the tags of dung and mud, and set aside anything matted. Sort as you go into three piles: the good blanket, the coarser neck and britch wool for rug yarn or felting, and the short belly wool for the compost. Sorting takes an afternoon and saves you hours later, because you never have to pick dirty fibres out of a carder.
What to look for in a lock
- Staple strength. Hold a lock at both ends and tug. Sound wool stretches and springs back; brittle wool snaps or sheds fibres in your hand.
- Crimp. Tight, regular waves suggest elasticity and a springy yarn. Straight, silky locks will spin into something smoother and heavier.
- Tip and base. Weathered, bleached tips are normal on an uncoated sheep. A weak, tender base is not — it usually means the fleece was shorn after illness or a long wet spell.
- Vegetable matter. A little hay is easy to pick out. Burrs and thistledown break into fragments when carded and will still be there in the finished skein.
- Second cuts. Short stubs left by a shearer going over the same patch twice. They felt into pills later; pick them out now.
- Smell. Lanolin is fine. Musty or sour is not, and mouldy wool is best composted.
Scouring: Hot Water and Still Hands
Wool felts when it meets heat, moisture, alkali and friction at the same time. Remove the friction and most of the danger goes with it. Fill a tub or a dedicated washing machine drum with water as hot as your hands can bear — warmer for robust fleeces, a little gentler for fine ones — add a neutral detergent rather than soap, which leaves scum in hard water, and lower the wool in without pouring water onto it.
Leave it alone for fifteen minutes. No prodding, no swirling. Lift the wool out, drain the dirty water, and repeat with fresh hot water and less detergent. Then rinse twice at the same temperature; a sudden cold rinse is what shocks wool into felt. A salad spinner or an old spin cycle removes most of the water before drying.
Dry the fleece on racks in the shade, with air moving underneath, turning it once. Never hang it dripping by the tips, which drags the fibre out of shape. The wash water is full of lanolin and fine dirt — let it cool, skim what floats, and check local rules before putting it on the garden.
Carding, Combing, or Flicking
Dry wool still has to be opened before it can be drafted. Hand cards produce fluffy, airy rolags full of trapped air. Wool combs or a flick carder align the fibres into a smooth, dense preparation. A drum carder sits between the two and suits anyone processing more than a couple of kilos.
Charge the tools lightly. An overfilled carder produces nepps, those little hard balls of tangled fibre that never draft out. Keep the wool moving, work in small batches, and pull out any remaining vegetable matter as it surfaces.
Woollen or worsted?
The choice shapes everything downstream. Carded woollen rolags spin into a warm, fuzzy, slightly irregular yarn that blooms when washed — good for hats, cardigans and anything where insulation matters more than stitch definition. Combed worsted preparation spins into a sleek, strong yarn with clear stitches, better for socks, mittens and outerwear that will take a beating.
At the Wheel: Drafting and Twist
Spin a sample before you commit. Draft a handful of fibre first, teasing it open until the strands slide past each other easily, then let the wheel take it in while your hands hold back the flow. Short forward draw gives control and consistency; long draw suits rolags and produces a softer, loftier yarn.
The ply-back test tells you whether you have enough twist: let twenty centimetres of singles double back on itself and look at the angle. Loosely twisted yarns drift apart in the ply; over-twisted ones kink and coil. Keep a sample card of every yarn you make, with a length of singles and a length of finished yarn wound onto it, plus a note of the ratio and the fleece. It is the only reliable way to repeat a good result six months later.
Thinness is not a virtue in itself. An even, well-consolidated medium yarn will knit into something better than a lumpy fine one, and consistency comes with time at the wheel far more than with any adjustment to the machine.
Dyeing with What Grows Here
Most natural dyes need a mordant to fix them to the fibre. Alum is the workhorse, used with a little cream of tartar, and it leaves colours clear and light-fast. Iron darkens and saddens a colour but makes wool brittle if overused, so keep it to a pinch in a separate pot.
The palette around the island is wider than it looks. Madder root gives brick reds and corals when kept below a simmer; onion skins give gold and copper with no mordant at all; walnut hulls give deep browns from their tannin; pomegranate rind and rosemary prunings give soft yellows and khakis. Woad and indigo give blue, but they need a proper reduced vat rather than a simmering pot. Cochineal shifts from pink to purple depending on whether you tip the bath acidic or alkaline.
Keep dedicated pots and spoons that never return to the kitchen, wear gloves, and work with ventilation. Some attractive garden plants are toxic in a dye bath, oleander being the obvious one, so identify anything you gather. Test every recipe on a small sample skein first, note the weight of fibre, the weight of dyestuff, the temperature and the time, and accept that the second bath will always be paler than the first.
Plying, Setting the Twist, and Finishing
Ply two or three singles together against the direction of the original twist, and check the balance as you go: a well-plied yarn hangs straight and doesn't corkscrew. Wind the skein off the bobbin, tie it in four places with a contrasting thread, and give it a warm wash with a little detergent. Rinse, press out the water in a towel, and thwack the skein against a clean hard surface a few times — it feels brutal and it aligns the fibres beautifully.
Hang the skein to dry with a light weight to straighten it, or without one if you want the texture to stay lively. Then measure: wraps per inch around a ruler, yardage on a reel or niddy noddy of known circumference, and weight. Write it all on a tag — breed or fleece source, date, dye plants, wpi — and store the skein out of sunlight with cedar or lavender against moths.
A Practical Plan for Your First Fleece
- Buy or beg a single shoulder of fleece rather than a whole one, and ask how it was skirted.
- Sort it on a mesh table in daylight, and be ruthless about the discard pile.
- Wash in small batches, two washes and two rinses, same temperature throughout.
- Dry completely on racks, then card a test batt and spin one bobbin before processing the rest.
- Dye small skeins first, keep notes, and only then commit a full batch to the pot.
The whole sequence takes a few weekends, and each stage teaches you something the next one rewards. Start small, keep records, and don't chase perfection in the first skein. The one after it will be better.
Photo: StockSnap / Pixabay