Shenanigans Yarn » washing fleece http://shenanigansyarn.com Tue, 25 Sep 2012 20:42:47 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 Washing fleeces http://shenanigansyarn.com/uncategorized/%post% http://shenanigansyarn.com/uncategorized/%post%#comments Tue, 22 Jun 2010 01:55:22 +0000 Susan http://shenanigansyarn.com/?p=85 Our LYS owner purchased some unindentified fleeces while on vacation in Oklahoma. And BTW if you have any idea what sheep it might belong to, we would love to know. Being the over-achievers that we are, we started with the most difficult one. It’s a double coat, so under tufts of long coarse hair, is a much softer finer fleece. Theory is that the outer coat catches most of the dirt and protects the inner coat. HA! I don’t know if every fleece is like this one, but it was anything but clean. We lovingly refer to it as Chewbacca. The process is not complicated, just back-breaking. Had we realized this fleece wasn’t skirted, we probably could have save ourselves some time. Basically the bottom third is too coarse and dirty to use for yarn, but we washed it anyway. We broke the fleece up into smaller chunks, which were soaked in several washes of hot water and soap. We did a rinse of vingar to neutralize the soap and then one more of clean water. We then laid out the washed hair on some old sheets. With a little bit of supervision we separated the inner from the outer hair as well as tossing what we deemed unusable. . Kimberly had these really cool sweater drying thingies, so we moved all the good part of the fleece to them for final drying.

Learning experiences:
Examine the fleece. If you don’t want to touch it now, you’re probably not going to want to spin, knit, or touch it later.
Skirt before washing. There’s no point in washing what you’re going to toss any.
Get the right equipment. Lots of buckets, and a cool drying rack definitely made this much easier.

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