Fiber Monday - Fleece washing

This week's installment really isn't about making things so much as it is getting ready to make things. Because I seem to have a compulsion to make things as complicated as possible, I have collected a fair amount of raw fleece over the past year. I needed to do something about their unwashed state. 

The weather cooperates, and I got a fair bit done. The merino that had been hanging around for a year is all washed. The Clun Forest is going to spend the winter in an outdoor shed and not get washed. I have plans for it come next spring when it's warmer. That left me with the Corriedale I bought at the Wisconsin Sheep and Wool Festival, the Cotswold from Kline Creek Farm, and a little over a pound of Shetland. The Cotswold had the most lanolin, so it moved to the top of the line. 

I'm guessing if you are still reading, you might have a vague interest in the process I use 

The first thing to do was soak it (well, some if it, it was too big to big to wash all at once) in plain water. That takes out quite a bit of the diet. This was a very dirty fleece.

That was clean water when it went in. The next day I drained off the dirty water. If it's a fine fleece, I set the bucket in the sun to allow the fiber to warm up a bit from being in the cold water. This is a long wool, so it's chances of felting when dumped in the hot scouring water, so I skipped that step. 

I then filled up three large bins with the hottest tap water I can get. The first bin also has a scouring agent added. (I use Power Scour because it is effective in hard water.) The heat and the scouring agent is what removes the lanolin. After twenty minutes, I move the wool into the first rinse tub, then twenty minutes after that I move it into the second. I learned the hard way that if you let the water cool too long in the scouring tub the lanolin just solidifies back into the wool. (The three tubs are all filled at the beginning of the process so that the water is similar in all three and you avoid shocking the fibers which might cause them to felt.) 

After the last rinse I lay them in the sun on a towel for a while to drain a bit. This makes the wool less soggy when I bring it in to out in the drying rack.

This has eight spaces, and you can see that the fleece fills a good many of them. The is the second (and last) batch that I've washed.

Here is the first batch that is all clean and dry.

Well, clean is a relative term. There is still a lot of vegetable matter in there that will need to be combed out. In curiosity, I did comb a very little bit of it to see how it combed.

This little cloud is all ready to spin. As you can see, the combing is a little magical, especially if you go back and compare it to that first picture.

The last thing I washed was the green dyed CVM that was still too greasy to work with. Washing it correctly made a huge difference.

The rewashed wool is on the left, the greasy wool on the right. Do you see how much more light and fluffy the clean wool looks? You'll also notice a distinct in color. When I washed it, what surprised me was the amount of color bleeding I was getting. Mainly I was surprised because the other two colors of still vaguely greasy wool I spun into yarn didn't bleed at all when I washed them. It seemed a mystery.

After a little digging, I learned that lanolin can inhibit dye penetration. Thus, when I finally removed the rest of the lanolin, the dye that had adhered to it washed away. The reason the skeins of yarn didn't bleed was the slightly cooler water and lack of scouring agent. I'll just need to be sure I wash whatever I make with them in cool water. 

As for spinning the green... I managed to finish combing it all. 

There is a lot of color variation, so I'll just be sure to mix up the different colors as I spin it. This is one of those projects I will be very glad to be finished with.

I have the Corriedale soaking right now. The weather promises to be unseasonably warm, so I'm hoping to get it all washed tomorrow afternoon. 

That just leaves me with the Shetland.

It's vacuum packed, so if I don't get to it before the weather turns, it should be okay until spring. Do you think I have enough raw material to play with over the winter?

The only other fiber thing I've done this week is continue to spin on my new wheel. 

I seem to have a lot of this mystery wool, but I think it's going to make a very pretty yarn.