Sheep Soup

Wash Day!
Ingredients:
1 tub
1 bag of fleece
1/2 c dishwashing liquid
hot water



What you see in the pictures is one of the three fleeces given to me by Nina's dad. I'm washing a little differently this time, having learned from the mistakes on batches 1 and 2.

Hot water, dish soap to cut the lanolin, and NO AGITATION! Just before Thanksgiving, I got a book in the mail along with my top whorl drop spindle. I'm following the instructions in that book for cleaning the greasewool. While this soaks, I'm working on my drop spindle spinning..which is going really well actually. I can make yarn fairly consistent in thickness. Next, I'll try for thinner yarn and see how that goes.

This fleece is going to soak for an hour, then I'll start the rinse cycles. I'll use warm water, not cold, so it doesn't shock the wool. I'm reading up online on where to get some top merino roving so I can try a bit of blended fingering weight wool. If I get REALLY squirrely, I may try spinning some alpaca or something other than wool.

So for now, we have sheep soup and the bathroom smells like a barn. But the lanolin is coming out, and a few rinses from now, I will have wool ready to dry over the heat ducts! Yea!!

First Wash complete. This is a ton of work. Here are a few things I've learned:

• When you take out the stopper in the tub, the entire fleece will try to leap down the drain.
• I think I'm glad I lost my sense of smell.
• First rinse is when you find all the poo nuggets that you failed to find before making tea/soup out of them.
• Sheep do not grow their coats uniformly. Thus, you get fleece fibers, plus 'kibbles and bits'. Which try to leap down the drain. And fit. Unlike the whole fleece.

After the rinse, I thought, gosh, this isn't as bad as I thought! I drained the fleece and put it by the back door to dry. It was then that I realized that no, I didn't really get all of the lanolin out in the first wash...it was that my hands were covered in lanolin after the rinse, so the fleece no longer felt sticky.

I'm going to let this batch dry anyway so I can get a feel for what one cleaning will do. The color variation in the wool struck me again - if this makes it to yarn-stage, it'll be hella fun to knit.

Now, to go bleach the tub. :)