Then comes the preparation for spinning.
First I wash it.
I do this in a giant pan, one fleece at a time. One day I will have a second sink in the kitchen to help with things like this. At the moment it is a faff doing it in the shower - the water doesn’t come out hot enough so lots of kettlefuls of water needed.
I fill the pan with water that is 55 °C as lanolin melts around 45°C. I add either fabric washing liquid or dish soap depending how I feel.
I put the wool in and plunge it up and down very slowly a few times to make sure the water has got through the wool. If you swish it around too much, it felts.
I then leave it for quite a few hours, perhaps over night.
I then empty the pan and refill with warm water at about 30°C and again swish gently then leave.
I repeat this with 30° water one more time. By this time the water is clearish. If it is not I rinse again.
Then I drain it well on a cake tray and then dry it on the clothes drying rack somewhere warm but out of the sun.
Next I pick it
This is basically going through the whole giant mess of wool that you have and pulling it all apart in to fluffy lumps. You can get tools to do it (one day!) which are basically two sheets of nails which are repeatedly pulled through the wool. By hand you just pull out bits and put them in a bag. It should be really fluffy when you finish this with no obvious lumps. You remove bits of grass and stuff as you go. Best to do somewhere you can easily hoover as all kinds of grott comes out if the fleece.
Poppy likes to help with picking
Carding
I then card it. You can do this with hand carders, but at the moment I always use the drum carder as it is auucjer. The hand carders look interesting when you want different preparations, but my spinning isn’t ready for that yet.
Now it is beautiful fluffy fleece ready to spin!
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