OK, the time has come (and passed, empirically) to wash some fleeces. I was in the basement the other day, and there was this pile of unwashed fleeces, sitting in their plastic bags, brought home from the “sheep shows” and dropped off “to be washed later”.

Later has come. There were eight fleeces. Yeah, I’m kind of embarrassed, but most of them were still in pretty good shape, except that the lanolin and waxes had started to harden, which means that it’ll take some extra soaking to get them clean. One of them, unfortunately, didn’t make it through the winter (I’m pretty sure I bought this in 2017). Moths had gotten in, laid eggs, and the larvae were making a mess of the fleece. Out into the compost pile. Fortunately, it was a small fleece (< 3#), and it was relatively inexpensive ($20), but I have learned my lesson. Tossing that fleece into the compost pile was like watching someone rip up a double sawbuck they pulled out of my pocket. Grrrr.

Here are a couple of pictures of fleeces being skirted (I think both Romney – I’m not great at annotating my photos). When the fleece is shorn from the sheep, it comes off (ideally) as a large blanket of fleece, with the back of the animal in the middle, and the edges are all leg and belly areas, which can be quite filthy, actually, covered in mud, hay, sheep manure, and other less amusing stuff. Skirting takes all of this junk away from the nicer bits. I just throw it into the compost pile, though the fleeces I purchase have typically been skirted pretty well. Skirting also include picking out bits of hay, seed heads, burrs, and whatever else the sheep might have gotten into. If you ever see a sheep with a coat on it, it’s not to keep the sheep warm. It’s to keep the fleece clean. These fleeces are marketed to handspinners, who appreciate the clean fiber.

After the fleece is skirted and picked over (do the very best job you can – it will come back to haunt you), I put about a pound, or a couple of good handfuls, of fiber into mesh lingerie bags.

The bags allow me to wash more than one fleece at a time without mixing up the fibers. I use a strip of Tyvek to label each bag with the fleece information, written with a Sharpie. The strip of Tyvek just goes into the bag. I can fit about eight or ten pounds of fleece in a load.

My washing machine (as contrasted with my wife’s washing machine) has only hot water coming into it. I only need hot water to wash fleece. Warm water, and by extension, cold water, just won’t cut the grease (lanolin). I fill the washer’s tub with the hottest water I can muster out of my water heater, turn off the washer, and pour in a half-cup of Dawn dishwashing detergent (I’ve heard that Palmolive is good, too), and submerge bags of fleece. After less than a minute, see how filthy the water is? Yuck!

I have a dowel I use to push everything down into the water. After 20 minutes, the wool has soaked and lots of the dirt has come off. I use the washing machine spin cycle to get rid of the dirty water, then remove the bags. I will wash the fleece at least once more – twice for a really greasy fleece (Merino, Rambouillet, etc), and then I’ll rinse it at least twice, using a cup of vinegar in the first rinse to clean out the detergent- more specifically, to rebalance the pH of the wool to its natural slightly acidic. Detergents tend to run alkaline, which is great for cutting grease. 

After that, the wool will air dry on repurposed window screens (or on a sweater dryer that I stole from my wife).

The dried fiber is then “picked” to break up the clumps of fiber, ideally separating each fiber from the others into a uniformly disorganized “cloud” of really fluffy wool. The picker in the linked photograph is typical in that it contains a large number of very sharp spikes that separate the wool fibers.

After this, there’s carding to do. Stay tuned…