Processing Wool

Skirting

Skirting removes the worst parts of the fleece - areas that are beyond salvage, often on the outside edges of the fleece. Most of the skirting will take place in the shearing shed. A heavily skirted fleece will contain very little poop, matted locks, vegetation material (VM) and caked in dirt. These undesirable areas are torn out and discarded, or repurposed as compost or garden mulch. Once you have finished skirting the raw fleece, you should be left with fibre worth cleaning and processing further.

This is the first fleece that I have ever prepared and it has taken a lot of courage to begin. This is a young Gotland fleece sourced from Australia. It has already been thoroughly skirted by the shearer and very few sections required further removal.

Sorting

The definition of undesirable fleece changes from person to person. If you are a band weaver, your concept of undesirable may be substantially different from a felter. Sorting your fleece is a second stage of skirting. This is your opportunity to closely inspect your raw wool, remove any remaining short cuts, vegetable matter, and stubborn knots.

Once you realise that there is order in the chaos, seperating a fleece lock by lock is methodical and deeply satisfying work. I will go into greater detail about the method I used below, but if you're interested in the process, check out this link.

Combing

Selective breeding to reduce the proportion of coarse kemp fibre to soft fleece has resulted in a huge variety of domestic sheep breeds. Primitive breed fleeces have a break point. This is a natural weakness of the fibre that occurs where the new growth of wool continues to lengthen fibres that grew the previous year. As you can imagine, the new growth has not seen the passage of time has a different quality to the year old fibres. The growth of new wool also brings a revitalisation of lanolin. In the wild, this break point would allow the sheep to roo and shed their fleece naturally. At this point, a clever shearer will cut just below the break point and use this new grease to hasten their shears. In the process, a small amount of short, new wool and/or second cuts may be present in the fleece and will need to be removed during combing.

When you comb your raw wool, all of these imperfections are trapped in the combing waste. Combing techniques will also allow for the separation of the coarse top outer hair from the finer, shorter underwool of the coat. Once combed, your fibre can be pulled from the tines of your combs into a wispy roving of fibre ready to dress your distaff for spinning.

Washing / Scouring

Raw wool, aka the fuzzy bit of the sheep, is imbued with a natural coating of grease. This is lanolin. Although "spinning in the grease" is completely achievable and preferred by some fibre aficionados, lanolin is often removed from the fleece prior to processing for cleanliness. After washing, you can expect a loss in weight. The greasier the fleece, the lighter it will be after a bath. Breeds with shorter staple lengths, such as Merino and Corriedale, will often yield a higher amount of lanolin, whilst those with longer staple lengths (Gotland, Leicester, Romney...) will contain a lesser amount. As such, shorter staple lengths may require a few washes to remove the lanolin to the same degree. Clean oils or clear fats were often reintroduced to the scoured fibre to assist with spinning after washing has occurred. Washed fleece is also prone to static.

A scouring substance or detergent may have been used to assist in the washing of fleece in Viking Age Norway. At Coppergate, a mineral clay derivative of fuller's earth was identified that may have been used to scour raw wool for processing. Other soaps, like those made from ash (lye) and animal fat may have also been used as a detergent. But, there is little evidence of this. Suint may also have been used to strip the oils from the fleece.