Fleece Day! or How I process a fleece, Part 1

For the past couple months every time the weather would give us a little taste of spring I would feel it start.  That itch for a new fleece to sink my fingers into and sort and wash and comb or card.

The thing is, when I learned how to spin three years ago, I really dived in head first.  I bought whole fleeces and raw wool and I learned a lot about what I like and what I don't like.

Over the last couple years I've worked on either processing or spinning those purchases, or in some instances, letting go of the wool.  I really hated to get rid of wool that I purchased, but I had to really evaluate whether some of that fleece was worth my time and energy or not.  I wanted to avoid that with future purchases, so I thought long and hard about what my standards or guidelines would be in the future.

One of the things I decided was that for the most part, I wanted to purchase fleeces I could buy in person.  I would prefer to be able to evaluate a fleece on my own before purchasing but also I wanted to avoid shipping fees. I also love working with truly local wool.  This was not a hard and fast rule though.  I simply cannot get everything I might want to work with locally.  

Also, you have to wait until they are actually available.

I was getting impatient.   I kept telling myself I had the Corriedale to work on.  I did keep working on it.  I really wanted some natural color wool to card though.  Finally, last week, I had some encouragement from someone who was probably tired of hearing me whine about wanting raw wool, and I went ahead and bought a small fleece.

I bought this Gulf Coast Native ewe's fleece from the Summer Field Fibers Etsy shop.  (I made this purchase prior to the strike.)  I've been looking at the fleeces in this shop for the past few years but because of the backlog of wool I held off on actually getting any.  This farm has Gulf Coast Native and also several GCN Crosses.  I almost purchased a GCN x Polypay fleece too, but I decided to reign it in and just stick with the natural colored GCN.

I have spun Gulf Coast Native wool a couple times now, both times were starting from raw wool; however, I have never had a whole GCN fleece and both batches of wool I had were white.  I've been wanting a natural color fleece, I was thinking I would probably get a Shetland fleece for that purpose, but when I saw the listing for Diamond's fleece and the terrific gray and tan color of it I knew it was exactly what I wanted.  This fleece weighed 1.8 lbs raw, so I don't know if I will end up with enough yarn for a sweater, but I think I may be able to do at least a short sleeved sweater, we will see.  The variation in color in the wool should make for some very pretty variegation in knitted fabric.  

Everyone has their own process for taking a fleece from raw to yarn, but I am going to share my process.  But first, here is what arrived on my front porch:

Here is the fleece, packaged nicely and with the info tag

Out of the bag, this is the cut end showing

Full fleece laid out on a sheet on the porch

A closer look at the fleece

As you can see from this first series of pictures, the first step for me is to check out what I have!  I have an old twin sized sheet I use to protect the surface of wherever I'm laying the fleece out but also to protect the fleece from picking up any extra bits and bobs.

This fleece was skirted, but I go through and do my own "skirting" too.  There was very little hay or twigs or other "vegetable matter" to pick out, but I pulled out a few bigger, obvious things right off the batt.  I also pulled off a few bits that I knew were too short to spin and some second cuts.  

The next step is sorting.  On this fleece all that meant was that I pulled off some sections, mostly around the legs, where the wool was noticeably coarser.  The wool isn't bad, but it doesn't have the same softness as the rest of the fleece so I am keeping that part separate from the other wool for now.

These are the preliminary steps I take with a fleece.  I also do things like the "ping test" to test for soundness.  The next step for me is scouring.  That will be Part 2 in this series.