Washing Fleece

One of the main aspects of my self-sufficiency plan is to process wool from fleece to yarn. I managed to acquire two fleeces in May, from a lovely lady down in Devon.

 They are two varieties, a cross which I can't quite remember, but the fleece is quite curly and rough. I find this one quite difficult to wash. And the second is a texel X blue-faced leicester, but it feels very much like a slightly finer than usual texel.

So let me go into the washing process in a little more detail. Firstly you must make sure you store the fleece somewhere cool and dry. In this case my garage.

I have them wrapped in old sheets to keep them cleanish.

So on a nice day, when is relatively warm and sunny (for the uk at least) I tear of chunks to wash. As I don't have anywhere suitable to store a whole washed fleece. 

Firstly you need to do what is know as skirting. Basically you search through the fleece and take out any undesirables; such as poo, bits of bugs and plant matter.

So to wash the fleece is use one of those flexi-tub bucket things and fill it 1/2 full with hot water from the tap and then top it up with boiling water from the kettle. The water needs to be hot, just hot enough so you can barely put your hand in it. To this I add a good squidge of washing up liquid. I like to use traditional green fairy because it quite concentrated. (A squidge probably equates to around a table spoon in normal person speak.) 

I need to weed the patio I know!

Once it has soaked for around 20 minutes you can removed it and change to water to clean water. You may need to do another "soap soak" or use plain water if it is clean enough and soak for another 20 minutes or so. An important thing to note is the temperature needs to be roughly the same otherwise the temperature shock can cause the fleece to felt. Which is no good for spinning!

Once your fleece is clean you can either leave it on some mesh to dry (or the swing chair) or stuff it into an old pillow case and swing it around. This actually has a proper name but I can't remember it right this minute. 

On the left in this photo is an unwashed fleece and on the right is a washed one.

I hope you find this information helpful and let me know if you have any other questions!