Fleece washing

I am kind of having my own mini blog week this week. The early morning sunshine has been waking me up early so I have been doing a post each morning in the time I would usually go back to sleep.

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This morning I had a bit of a crisis. I logged into blogger and it told me I didn't have any blogs, would I like to start one?

This resulted in a bit of a panic, I thought it was gone forever. Fortunately after the computer inexplicably turned itself off and on again the blogs returned, so I don't have to remake them. Relieved is not the word!

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On to the fibery goodness. Today's ramblings are going to be about fleece washing. I talked about this a lot last year as I did my first fleece. This the cleaning portion of the fleece I discussed sorting a couple of weeks back.

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The locks came out of the bucket kind of like a jelly from a mold (jello to anyone in the US), but obviously much less tasty.

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This did make it easy to peel off a thin layer of locks and put it into a washing bag.

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The shower was set to cold and low pressure and the bag of locks rinsed. That's right, straight onto the fleece. This gets masses of dirt out. Best not to think about what the dirt is. A few squeezes and flips to make sure that as much as possible had gone.

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Heat and soap are needed to remove the lanolin. One bucket of hot soapy water and a couple of bags of locks. Leave for ten minutes or so (that bit sounds like a recipe)

Two rinsings in hot but non soapy water clear a lot of the remaining soap and lanolin.

Finally a spin in an old salad spinner shifts a lot of the water. This is a big improvement as it dried in a single sunny day rather than the two or three days it takes without a spin.

The bags were hung on the line to dry and are now waiting to be carded.

I have not yet decided if I am going to do more fleeces. I have a lot to card and spin but after that I might go back to purchased roving. While it is good to have experienced the process it takes a lot of hours to get a smallish quantity of usable fluff, and honestly roving for standard breeds is not overly expensive, especially if you priced up all the hours it takes to sort, wash and card.

Techniques- Fleece washing round up

As I tried a lot of fleece washing methods I thought a round up post would be a good idea so next year I can see what to do and what to avoid.

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Starting with this, a Suffolk fleece, so fairly robust and felting resistant.

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Lingerie bags and buckets

Sort the fleece into chunks and place them into lingerie washing/laundry bags. Not too much in each bag.

Put the bags into a bucket(s) of cold water and leave to soak for a few hours. Change the water and give them a second cold soaking for a while, even overnight. Do not pack too much into each bucket.

Do a very hot wash cycle- once with dish washing soap, once with clear water and once with vinegar and a little hair conditioner, soaking for about twenty minutes each time. Do not run hot water directly onto the fleece or go from hot to cold water. Avoid moving the fleece too much.

Drain and squeeze/spin as much of the water out as possible.

Hang the bags to dry or lay them flat over a mesh drier.

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This gives a fairly clean fleece, there were still some dirty patches and the tips were stuck together. It also uses a lot of hot water.

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Lock by lock

Prepare three tubs/buckets as for the hot wash cycle above.

Pull a lock from the fleecey mass and swish it in each of the buckets in turn until it is clean. Put into lingerie bags to dry.

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This gets the fibre nice and clean and the locks are sorted ready for combing or carding. It takes ages though and losing the bit of dirtiness at the tip of the lock means it does not stay together particularly well during the drying.

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Bags of locks

Take a chunk of fleece and gently but firmly pull out all of the locks. Lay them flat and thinly spread into lingerie type washing bags.

Do a cold water soak for several hours/overnight.

Do a three cycle hot wash (soap, nothing, vinegar and hair conditioner) trying to keep the bag fairly flat to avoid the locks clumping together. Lay flat to dry.

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This gave fairly clean locks which dried very quickly. There is also less to store as the junk has been removed and time is saved when carding/combing as the locks are already sorted for you. It does take ages to get them sorted and into bags though.

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Washing machine on cold

Sort the fleece into chunks and place into lingerie bags. Put through the washing machine on a cold wash with normal machine washing liquid.

Do a three cycle hot wash (soap, nothing, vinegar and hair conditioner) and spin/squeeze out as much water as possible. Dry.

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A little felting occurred, as the machine wash did not remove the lanolin at all it was not really worth doing.

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Washing machine on warm

Sort the fleece into chunks and place into lingerie bags.

Put through washing machine at 40 degrees centigrade using normal machine washing liquid.

Dry

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This method resulted in quite a bit of felting, it was possible to pull locks out though. There was no greasiness left in the fibre. Also not really worth doing.

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Shower hosing

Divide fleece in manageable chunks. Put in bath tub and spray with shower set to cold until the water is running clear from all parts of the fleece.

Do a three cycle hot wash (soap, nothing, vinegar and hair conditioner) then squeeze/spin water out and put into laundry bags to dry.

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This worked well and gave the cleanest of the washes. It does still smell a bit sheepy, I think more water during the hot wash stage might have helped. This could be a downside of washing in fairly large chunks.

I am most likely to use this method to wash the fleece I have left.

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The end result (this was a bags of locks wash):

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Techniques- More fibre washing

I have been watching a thread called "No more lingerie bag scouring for me" in the fibre preparation group on Ravelry. The point of the thread is fairly obvious from the title, it discusses how someone tried washing with free fleece and got great results. As I was on my last chunk of fleece I thought I would give it a go.

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First up spread the fleece out in the bath tub. I still did it in chunks, but reasonably large ones compared to what I would put in a bag.

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Set the shower to cold.

Take a deep breath and spray that fleece!

Remember to breathe!

Lot of nastiness washed away, when the water ran clear I gave it a squeeze and scooped it into a bucket while I did the next bit of fleece.
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Once it was all well rinsed and running clear I did a hot wash cycle (soap, no soap, vinegar and conditioner) using the entire tub.

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It worked really really well!
I have to agree with the original thread poster that it is the cleanest of all my washes, the tips are still a little stuck together, but I find that helpful for carding/combing anyway and the bulk of the fleece is lovely and white. There was no felting at all!
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I will definitely be using this method again as I have found myself with a extra fleece that needs cleaning. It seems to clean better and I can get more done faster using the shower method than using buckets. Obviously it would probably be a bad idea for delicate fibres, those that felt easily, but for this fairly robust Suffolk it seems to work out great.
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I do have a problem with getting it dry though, the British autumn has set in with a lot of rain.

Techniques- hand carding

After trying out combing as a method of fibre prep I moved on to having a go with my hand carders. I followed the instructions for hand carding in The Whole Craft of Spinning by Carol Kroll, a skinny but very useful book.

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First I pulled locks out of the washed mass of fluffiness and placed them on the left hand carder.

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The right hand carder is then brushed over the left with the paddles held in opposite directions. I can't show pictures of this in action as I need two hands for the carders and a third for the camera, one day I might recruit some help to take pictures as I go.

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The fibre is moved from the left carder to the right and recarded, this is repeated until all the fibre is nicely combed out across the surface of the hand carders with all the tangles removed.
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I wanted the fibres lined up in a parallel fashion, worsted style (I am a bit sketchy on the woollen/worsted thing, the problems of being largely self taught, but I wanted an approximation of the roving you buy). To achieve this the combed fibre was lifted off each carder, giving a sheet of parallel fibres.
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The sheet of fibres was rolled from side to side to give a fat sausage of fibre (turned through 90 degrees for this photo).
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Just to see if it would work I lightly drafted the fibre sausage to give a longer roving style sausage for spinning,
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The hand carding was definitely a lot faster than combing, although still quite a slow process (compared to waving a credit card at the internet). The finished product was also not quite and neat as the combed fibre, more short fibres has passed through making a few little lumps that needed pulling out. Possibly easier to spin from though.

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There was quite a lot of waste fibre once the locks had been pulled out, shorter bits and tangled fluff, I could possibly have carded this too, but it would only be worth it on a really special fleece. The waste level was comparable to combing as a preparation method.
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And just because they are called hand carders they are not for combing hands with. They are surprisingly sharp!
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Techniques- Fibre combing

This is not really a how to, more of a what I did next. The fibre I washed last week was nice and dry by the weekend, I decided that the washing had not been too much of a fail after all and to get on with making the fleecy pile into something I could spin with. The first technique on my list was combing.

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Since I am skint I found these in the local pound shop- £1 each. They are reasonably strong as well.

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I did try a comb/carder like thingy combo, but it was not overly successful (pictures may follow at some point). So the rest was done with just the two sided dog comb.

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First a lock was pulled off the fleecy mass

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Then combed, towards the tip first, then towards the cut end (the butt? giggles immaturely). The more tangly ones I used the wider teeth first then turned the comb over and gave it a go with the finer side.
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Mmmmm, fluffy
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Mmmmmm, lots of fluffiness
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The locks came up beautifully fluffy, there was quite a bit of rubbishy stuff, mostly shorter hairs and the like that got binned.
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The main downside to combing it lock by lock is that it takes ages, I haven't weighed the box of fluff yet, but there will not be a lot in there. Next week I will be giving hand carders a go.