I’m finally back to rugs, and hopefully this is the start of a “rug from scratch”, ie a fleece … sorted, washed, carded, spun and finally woven. Here’s the fleece, a black and white Jacob, fresh (poo!) from the sheep, and full of sheepy smelling grease. 

The shearer had rolled this up neatly and in the proper fashion, so all I had to do was unwrap the band (made my twisting the neck wool) from the fleece bundle, unroll it and unfold where the sides had been turned in.
Fresh from the shearer, the first job a fleece needs is called skirting. When a sheep is sheared,  the shearer first unzips the fleece down the belly then works the sheep out of it’s wool as though he were taking off a romper suit. A well sheared fleece should be all in one piece (like this one). The wool at the edges is from the belly, legs, bum and neck. At best this wool is matted and coarse, at worst it’s full of sheep poo. First job is to go round the edge removing all the unusable bits.

Now to wash, first a cold soak with some washing up liquid (cuts grease). The wash water is dark brown and supposed to be good for the garden. I’ll leave it to soak for a while, then it’ll need quite a lot of rinsing, a spin dry and thorough drying on a nice sunny day - fingers crossed for a few days of good weather.

 Nice weather this weekend so mostly gardening time, but later I managed to run the fleece through the carder.

Here it all is, lots of little twists (batts) of carded unspun humbug coloured wool, black white and mixed. This was quite a small fleece (comparatively), each of the batts weighs around an ounce and the total is around less than 3lb (half a rug at best!)

 2nd Sept - Back on track  and starting to spin. A lot of kemp in the white parts of the fleece.

This is my “Little Gem” Spinning Wheel my Majacraft. It has big bobbins which make it better for spinning a chunky wool.