Spinning in the half grease

I tried a minimal wash of the Shetland Grey. This was to get some of the grease and dirt out but avoid the start of the felting process.

It produced a wool that was still tough to work with in the carders but had very few felted fibres in it. Spinning was also a little tough due to the grease - but it was not like spinning raw fleece.

I am looking at a new soap called synthrapol which degrease fleece in cold water.

I am also going to more tightly control my water temperature and see if I can can completely clean a fleece with a lower temperature water and still have felt free fibres.

Woollen - what the heck is that?

I just finished off the first lot of Shetland Grey using my standard spinning style - worsted.

The wife then informs me that we need woollen spun yarn. I have never spun woollen.

Originally she told me that to felt we would need worsted wool. We looked around the country and found very little wool let alone worsted. Most of the yarns available were 90% acrylics and 10% natural fibres (not really specifying what natural fibre means). So we decided that I could spin some nice fleeces into wool and she could felt them.

She had read that she needed worsted wool to felt small fluffy objects and so that is the method I had learned. I have produced half a kilo of yarn based on the worsted spinning method. We tried to felt a couple items using worsted and it took an age to get to any stage that was satisfactory. Recently she read that you cannot felt worsted wool - which I disagree with. With tenacity and a very busy washing machine you can felt even the most disagreeable piece of knitted woollen wear.

So I have turn my thoughts to the woollen spinning style. Supposedly it is a similar style to worsted but your hands are doing different things.

My thinking when spinning is to transform this mess of tangled chaos into a cohesive order of wooly contentment. The fleecy fibres are going every direction and take these and make a yarn out them that is ordered. The division between these two states is the two fingers that hold the wool before it hits the orifice. Our one hand is untangling the mass of wool while the other two fingers are the final stage between the mass of fibre and the fine yarn being produced.

Woollen spinning seems to be based on using jumbled fibres and keeping them jumbled but twisting them into yarn. My little binary brain cannot deal with this dichotomy. A fibre cannot be unaligned and yet ordered.

I will need to figure this out.

Washing more Shetland Grey

I tried pre-drafting last night and I underestimated the speed at which I could spin when using this method. A bin of carded wool that would normally take a couple nights to spin up was quickly run through last evening. The Shetland Grey's longer staple means that it is possible to pre-draft this wool, the dark Shetland Mutt fleece's staple was roughly half the length.
I have roughly 250g of yarn on one bobbin and need another quarter kilo to fill the next bobbin. So, I rolled out the Shetland Grey fleece and selected some really nice collar pieces to wash next.
They are currently in their second wash and I decided that I had enough time to write a short entry.

Washing Wool and the War against Felt

Got a comment on washing wool in hot water and so I thought I would discuss the basic kit you need to turn smelly, mucky raw fleeces into something that is workable.

The first person who taught me to spin wool (June from Aberfoyle Spinners) insisted on spinning in the grease. I have done this on occasion but I decided to give up on the benefits of this method to the more troublesome practice of spinning cleaned woolen fleeces. I have not yet purchased cleaned wool, instead I usually buy a quantity of raw fleeces and clean them myself. The first step is skirting the fleece and removing the mucky bits, the slubs produced by second blows, and the obvious planty parts. I have found that shaking out a fleece is a good method of getting the larger particles out. Cleaning a raw fleece is really a war of attrition against everything that the sheep has managed to stick into its wooly coat in between shearings. You will never get rid of everything. I have occasionally found straw sticking out of a yarn while plying, A small piece which survived the whole cleaning and spinning process. Don’t worry about it too much – you are simply retaining the homemade charm of the yarn.

June worked only with raw fleeces, opening up the tips with a small Ashford mini carder. This does have a lot of advantages, the lack of washing and drying before spinning, means that the fleece has no opportunities to start felting.

The washing of fleece for spinning really is an adventure in anti-felting. Everything the felter does to produce their lovely fluffy little wooly products is exactly what you should not do when cleaning your raw fleece. The felter will rub their wool together, change up the temperature and agitate the fleece to get it to tightly felt.

So, we do the opposite. Use hot water and soap (like the felter) but do not agitate or rub the fleece. I usually leave the fleece in an initial soak for roughly twenty minutes. Fill another tub with soap and send it into second wash. The first washtub is dumped down the toilet, since this is not a liquid you want near your bathtub enamel (or your drains). After the fleece has been soaking for twenty minutes, a third tub is used for rinsing. I rarely use three tubs, normally just swapping between two tubs.

I have been told to squeeze out the fleece like a sponge after the rinse. I have opted to minimize any felting movements and instead lay a couple rods across the tub to raise the fleece up and let it drip. When the wool has stopped dripping, I load it into a cloth bag and take it outside to spin it dry. You need to watch that you don’t injure your elbow or shoulder, but a minute of wizzing the bag around leaves the wool dry enough to be left on top of a radiator. I use a towel and drying rack to keep the wool from direct contact with the heat.

Finally, I have found a pair of rubber gloves that have helped a great deal. They are lined with a cotton fabric and really help in working with very hot water. Eventually the heat will start to work its way through but they have meant I can work at much higher water temperatures than I could without them.

Felting from homespun

The wife and I spent a long time trying to get a pair of slippers to felt. The slippers were knitted from the Shetland Mutt fleece and the yarn was hard spun worsted. Before it was washed, it felt like cable. The washing opened it up a bit and gave it a much nicer handle, but it was much more tightly spun than a commercial yarn.

The felting took a couple hours of rubbing the slippers in a bucket of soapy water and four hot washes in the front loader washing machine. I am thinking that this yarn needs to be prepared better before it is used in another felting project. I'm thinking of taking the current ball of yarn, turnning it back into a skein and washing it a couple more times. This would "fuzz" it up a bit more and make it easier to felt.

Washing wool and soap selection

There has been a lot written about the type of soap/detergent you should wash raw fleece in. Up until recently I was using dishwashing detergent. For every tub of hot water (stupidly hot water - more than 120 F), I would squeeze in a couple shots of dishwashing liquid (Co-op own brand, various scents).

I then read that dishwashing soap is not the best choice. Alden Amos spends some time discussing the properties of various soaps and says that the most basic soap is the best one to use. His argument is that the more complicated soaps have assists (additives - Skin moisturisers and such) which can coat the fibres and cause problems with spinning.

So, I switched to pure soap flakes (Boots £1.20) and used it to wash a skein of yarn freshly taken off the Louet's bobbins. First of all it was pure soap which fit with the Amos philosophy, but it was a pain in the ass. The flakes were quite large and took a lot of agitation to dissolve. At the end of two sessions of washing (one wash and one rinse) I found a couple flakes (soapy chunks) stuck to the yarn and had to do a second rinse.

I thought about the aim of the Co-op dishwashing liquid and determined that it probably would be fine to wash the remainder of my fleeces. First, it contains no hand conditioner compounds, secondly the only assists it does contain are those used to cut grease. In the case of the wee dirty fleeces I need to clean, this is a very good thing.

So, I have gone back to the dishwashing liquid. Much easier deployment and takes up less space in the cupboard. It also leaves the yarn with a less sheepy smell than the soap flakes did.

Good wool and Bad wool

Not all wool is the same. There is the difference between breeds and the age of the sheep, in addition, the time of shearing and the environment that the flock is raised also changes the fleece. If you get raw fleece you will have a different process of turning this into yarn than if you buy tops, roving or batts.

A single animal will produce different qualities of fleece. The fleece near the head (collar) and along the lower ribs of the sheep (skirt) are probably the best parts. The top of the back is prone to matting due to the rubbing of the animal while the back end is usually decent quality wool but needs a lot of cleaning.

At the end of the selection process, you want fibres that are fine, long, clean, free of slubs and of consistent length. All of this even before you touch a wheel or even starting washing the fleece.

Things I have learned - Lesson 1

It is all about the Rhythm

When you start to spin - a lot of things are happening at once. Wheels are turning, feet are treadling, flyers and bobbins are twirling, hands are drafting and so on. It does seem to be a bit of madness. Out of this Sharmanka-esque activity, you need to produce a fine woollen product.

The only way to master this madness is to adopt a rhythm, to guide the rate that your feet and hands work. Once you get that rhythm in your appendages, things will go a lot easier.

June from Aberfoyle Spinners told me this when I first arrive at the Scottish Woollen mills. I have not yet mastered it. Hopefully, I will embrace it and things will go easier for me.

I have tried a couple different soundtracks for spinning, including the traditional Scottish dance and most recently soul.

Soulful tunes from Marvin Gaye, Al Green and Otis Redding seem to lend themselves to the work of spinning. Not sure if speed metal or 80's rave will be suitable.

A geek learning about spinning

I thought this would be a good place to record my notes as I learned various lessons about spinning and the world of working with fibre.

A simple disclaimer:

This will not be about spiritual adventures with fibre or spinning energy into woollen garments. It is much more about a technology guy coming to grips with old ways of doing things.