Wool Sorting

The Sunday after the Corydon Fiber Festival, I was given a surprising offer. My church's organist is a spinner. He had three bags of wool sitting at home not being spun. Did I want it? I said sure. I figured the fleeces can be sorted, cleaned up and used for SCA demos to teach children about spinning.

I was expecting 8 - 15 pound fleeces. Hubby weighed himself while holding two of the bags. I was gifted with two fleeces that weigh approximately 20 pounds. 0.o


exhibit A, two out of three bags full.

Today I popped one of them out of the plastic and sighed.

It should not retain this shape. Carefully unrolling it, I discovered the sheep had not been sheared in one pass. The fleece was in sections. This was not a bad thing since the belly wool with most of the debris was one section, the sides were two more sections and the back was a final section.

I found two bits of hoof paring in the fleece.

this one was the larger of the two.

As you can see, I had expert supervision. Miss Priss, diva kitty of the universe, had a good time sniffing at the wool, rubbing her cheeks on it and finally trying to prevent me from taking it away from her.


Once ownership was settled, (I have the thumbs, I win) she had to check out the stuff that is heading to my compost heap


My final haul from one of the fleeces is pretty impressive.


I'm not looking forward to washing and carding all of this. I may take everything over to a mill and let them do the hard part so I can do the fun part of spinning yarn.