Washing Wool

This picture is of a portion of the flock of up to 80 Shetland Sheep we formerly kept. Then, for various reasons, we sold off most of our flock, but not before we had a huge pile of wool in our hay loft. Commercial wool buyers want white wool, not colored fleeces. Most shepherds of small flocks like ours don't receive enough from the sale of the wool to cover the cost of having the sheep sheared. A big part of the cost of wool yarn is due to the processing it takes to get it to that point, processing wool is a time consuming project.

Our answer to this situation is, do it ourselves. Ann sheared them herself.  Since we wouldn't sell the raw fleeces to most commercial buyers for what they offered we had few other options. Number one, take it all to a custom woolen mill and have it processed. Or, number two, do it ourselves. While Ann sometimes hinted that it would be nice to just get it all processed I am to much of a tightwad to go that route. After crunching all the numbers it was plain to me that the only one making any money on our wool would have been the woolen mill.

We still have a big pile of wool in our hay loft and recently I had another one of my brilliant ideas. I have wanted to make a insulated blanket that will roll down over the front of my green house on cold   nights to help hold the heat in. What could be better than a wool quilt?! Off I went to the hayloft to get some wool and start my project. My first step when I got it back to the cabin was to pull out the nicer sections of the fleece and soak them in some nice warm soapy water. After letting it soak for a couple hours I drained it and did it again.

Care must be taken when washing wool so as not to make it into a big lump of felt. Agitating the wool while it is wet is a big no-no as is rapid changes to water temperature. If you don't do those two things every thing will be alright. I used cheap dish washing detergent to do this.Here in the bottom picture is my first batch of wool spread on some screens to dry. It was about then that Ann came in and looked over the wool. " This is nice looking wool",she said. "Look at the crimp in it". " This would spin nice", she said. Do you see where this is going?  So anyway, I'm going to take some of the yucky stuff and the parts with lots of chafe in them and make greenhouse quilts with that.