Ground truth

It's important, I guess, to measure things accurately - my 'time' estimates for a bath based wash had started from putting the first wool into the water.  In reality a cycle begins when the fleece is sorted and divided into 'bag lots', and it ends when the wool is spread out on the drying rack.

So...

The now more accurate time for a complete wash cycle for (approximiately) a pound of wool is 1 hour and 45 minutes start to end.

Once the cycle is underway there are 10 minute gaps while waiting for each 15 minute immersion period to complete so I guess if doing another cycle immediately afterwards I would be preparing the wool for that next load.  Hmmmmnnn...

Can I squeeze it down to 1:30????

Wash water

As I noted in the last post - the 'clean' wash water soon gets rapidly less so (but I didn't capture this in the pictures).  I've been running another load through the process today and have the following evidence that there is rather a lot of 'dirt/dust/etc' in the wool:

not the ideal bath water for bathing!!

In with the dirt is the emulsified lanolin and some other oils that I forget the name of - all go down the drain, and a flushed from the wool in the next two rinses.

Bath night

A little bit of spinning going on, but in an effort to speed up the scouring process I have 'up-scaled.'

Using the same method as in the past, but using the bathtub instead of the kitchen sink.  I've bought three larger baskets (yet to drill holes in the bottom of them though), and a few more larger laundry bags.  First step, as always is to pick just the best locks - some are over 4 inches long, others way less than 2 - I'm not washing/saving the latter. Load up the laundry bags, and put them into the plastic baskets - I use bamboo skewers to keep the bags in place (they float up on the first rinse - all other times they happily sink - I bet there is some science involving a light coating of emulsified lanolin, but I'm happy to just know when it occurs and how to fix it).

Final sort of fleece, into laundry bags in baskets

Once ready to go it's into the bath - I've tried this first lot with 3/4 cup of Dawn (yellow) dishwashing liquid.  Along with the hot tap water (120 degrees F) is two large pots of boiling water to raise the overall temp to nearer 140 degrees.

Scouring (way before the water goes brown)

The extra heat

Then the first rinse (the floater)

submerged courtesy of weight

And the second rinse with the addition of a couple of tablespoons of white vinegar (softens the wool).

the sinking rinse

After the final drain - the remaining water is removed by rolling the laundry bags of wool in towels (can be done in a washing machine on spin), and then onto the drying rack - I've managed to maximise the one 'rack' I have - and will come up with a better way of stretching it out as while "The Complete Works of Shakespeare" is a weighty tome - I can probably do better technically.

all the wool in a small place

and now drying

So revised times (once the weight is in - and the wool is dry) for washing all the fleeces should be considerably less than the first round, as while it takes a bit more than an hour to run through this process - there's a large increase in the total wool washed in one go.

A couple of the 'clumps' of wool in the photo could perhaps do with a second wash - I can only wait until I run a second lot through to really tell if I'm getting consistent results, and if needed I can take those bits and then try dying it (while still un-carded).

Washing results

My guess was right - I managed to get 6 washes done before running out of drying space on my makeshift drying rack.  There's probably room for a little more - I'll work on better ways of setting it up.

All up - just on 1 lb of wool all ready for processing.

Washing day

The process of scouring the wool is not a particularly fast one, and based on some very rough calculations - the amount of wool I have at the moment, if I were to do one wash a night (which I tried last week), would take me just on a year to completely wash all the fleeces.

Sounds fairly grim, but that is one wash a day and it really only takes 1 hour to to that wash start to end. So... based on [once again very rough] calculations; I could do 6-8 washes a day which would complete a fleece in a weekend.  Much better sounding.

Today is a test of that process - I'm onto wash number 3 - I think the difficulty is my 'drying rack' may fill up before I finish the washes for the day.

The reason for the 'roughness' in the calculations is that while I might start with a whole fleece I am NOT washing anything that I won't spin, so short locks go out in the rubbish as I go.  A lot of the wool has locks less than 2.5 inches which can be prepared for woolen spinning, but I'm been fussy given I have so much to select from :-)

Wool processing

Once scoured and accumulating in a box it was time to do some more processing trials:

Wool can be spun in two ways - as worsted: think shiny, less 'lofty', stronger, or
woolen: lofty (holds lots of air = warmer), a whole lot less ordered, and less strong.
In reality there are many many varying combination of these two methods used to spin wool.


Basically they both start the same way - each lock is flick carded lightly to spread out the fibres (which mostly retain their form through the scouring process - perhaps loosening the crimp a little).  This is done on your leg on a piece of protective leather.

flick carded lock

Once a whole lot of these have been done then you can proceed to one of two steps depending on the method of spinning (or varieties chosen).  For woolen you typically spin from a rolag (no hard and fast rules, there are other ways).  A rolag is prepared by taking opened up locks and using hand carders gradually straightening out the fibres as they are 'brushed' from one carder to the other.  I'm just beginning to learn how to do this.  Typically this method is used for 'shorter' fibres (once again no hard and fast rules on where that mark lies), with the fibres being more chaotically arranged in the length of the yarn once spun.

hand carded rolag

For worsted spinning the fibres are typically all arranged in line along the length of the yarn.  This can be done by a couple of methods, but the one I have used for this test is to use my drum carder to make a batt.  Running the opened locks a couple of times through the carder produces a beautifully soft, ready to spin batt.  Noting that the batt in the picture is about 1/2 size (as I only used a few locks in the test).

drum carded batt