Weaving - Finding Wool

I thought I wanted to be a weaver. As long as I was doing a little bit of weaving every once in awhile - it was quite affordable buying wool from a local wool shop.  When I decided to make my first large wall hanging I realized that (1) I could not afford to keep on buying wool and (2) that I never could find the colours that I wanted.  I thought learning how to spin and then dying the wool would solve both of those problems. How hard could spinning be?  After a failed attempt to spin using a spinning wheel I had bought at a farm auction, I took a three hour class in spinning basics. I then bought part of fleece on-line and started to play. That first fleece was, I think a lovely fleece. It was, of course, still full of lanolin, but there were no bits and pieces of straw or seed (what sheep folks call vegetable matter) stuck to it. I processed it all by hand, spinning it using a homemade drop spindle. While the final product was useable, it was a time consuming and still a fairly expensive process. I decided to buy a whole fleece directly from a sheep farmer.

I bought my first full fleece from Mary Grant from Bolsolver who is an internationally recognized spinner. I met her through a friend of ours who use to shear her sheep.  She and her husband had been raising championship sheep for years. Her fleeces were clean and wonderful. They were all skirted (meaning that all of the wool that had been dragged through mud or had chunks of manure dangling had been disposed of). There was almost no vegetable matter attached to them. Because of the high quality of the fleeces, they were very expensive. Buying from Mary was always fun as she had lots of stories to tell about sheep raising and of being a master spinner. When I went out there to buy a fleece I mentioned my story about buying an old broken spinning wheel and the frustration of trying to get it to work.  Mary solved that problem by selling me a used spinning wheel.

It is surprisingly difficult to find farmers who have raw fleeces for sale. Most wool is not worth very much . In fact much of it is worth nothing at all. Sheep that are bred mainly for the meat frequently have wool that is un-spinable. Farmers who raise sheep primarily for the knitters' and spinners' market can and frequently do charge a lot of money for each fleece. The really well known producers seem to have a market for their fleeces before they are sheared. I have been lucky to find a local farmer who, while he does make money off of the lambs, keeps a flock of Cotswold sheep primarily because they are a rare breed that was in danger of dying out in Canada. Cotswool sheep have lovely fleeces and Tom's prices are very reasonable. However, his fleeces have lots of vegetable matter in them and I need to get rid of all tags ( all of the bits and pieces of wool that are covered in mud, manure or a combination of both). They are a lot more work than Mary's fleeces were.

This past week he gave me a call and said that he was having his sheep sheared and did I want to come out a pick out the fleeces that I wanted? Of course I did.

 Sheep are not the brightest of animals and all it takes to get them into the barn is someone rattling a wee bit of grain in a bucket. Once one runs in, the rest seem to follow.

It should be noted that while the lamb in the forefront was as white as it appears, the other sheep are dirty, especially their back-ends which can be quite disgusting. Here the sheep are being placed into the barn so that it is easier to catch them to be sheared.

Tom's sheep are quite friendly and while they don't actually come over to have their ears scratched, they certainly are curious about what is going on around them .

  I meant to take some pictures of the actual shearing but once I started to help sort and bag the fleeces my hands became so covered in lanolin that  I did not want to touch the camera, It really is sticky stuff.

 

The sheep are not nearly as attractive after they have been sheared. Not surprisingly, they are also not nearly as friendly. 

I left about three hours after I had arrived, covered in lanolin, smelling like a sheep. My car which now held ten bags of wool, did not smell much better.

In previous years I have tried to buy the largest fleeces. This year I went for slightly smaller fleeces but ones that seemed to have less vegetable matter and were less matted. I am hoping that that will mean less work and less waste.