Video Notes:

Follow along as I continue preparing and processing my Coopworth/Bluefaced Leceister cross fleece.

IG: barrowsandwights
https://ko-fi.com/barrowsandwights

Transcripts for videos are available on my website.

Notes:

Tools Used:

• Swing Picker
• Fleece Combs
• Brother Drum Carder
• Ashford Kiwi 2 spinning wheel
• Classy Squid drop spindle
• Spare bobbins

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Attributions:

Title Card:

Photo by Anton Atanasov
https://www.pexels.com/photo/landscape-photo-of-forest-1655901/

Logo designed and drawn by A.R. Gergler

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End Screen:

Photo by Anton Atanasov
https://www.pexels.com/photo/landscape-photo-of-forest-1655901/

Transcript:

[Music]

This wool came from a coopworth and Bluefaced Lester cross sheep. There is 8 lb and 4 oz of this. It’s got this lovely crimp. That’s the main decision that I’ve made at this point, that I will combing these locks going forward.

I bought a new toy. This is a big box. It’s bigger than I expected. This, friends and enemies, is a swing picker which is used in the processing of sheep wool to open up the locks to make them easier to card or comb or whatever. Let’s open this up and take a look. And here it is. Uh, it looks like a medieval torture device, as most fiber tools tend to if you’re unfamiliar with them. I’ve never used one of these before so this is going to be fun.

Hello, it is June 2nd 2022 and I have made the executive decision that I’m no longer going forward with combing this fleece. I’ll admit part of it is because it’s a very slow process and I was hoping to have made more progress by this point. The more important reason is that combing this fleece, especially the parts of the fleece where it is kind of stickier and has more lanolin, is hurting my wrists. And this is not I’m not used to these movements so they’re a little sore. It is painful. I have really only been able to comb out one or two fluffs twice a week and I had to stop working on this project altogether for two weeks because I did too much combing over a weekend. So, while the combing does give me a result that I really like for this yarn, I cannot put uh my own body in that kind of jeopardy. Um when my wrists hurt like this, it makes it difficult to work. It makes it difficult to use the computer. It makes it difficult to do just about anything. Uh these combs will be put away for the time being. They’re basically going to have to be just for playing with color for already prepped fleece um or fleeces that really don’t have a lot of lanolin. And by fleeces, I mean smaller portions of a fleece. I will probably not hand comb an entire fleece.

So going forward the plan is to put the rest of my flicked wool through my drum carder. Um that will also take some time because these will probably have to go through the drum carder two to four times to get them kind of smooth in the way that I want them to be. I will also be feeding through the waste wool from combing the fleeces. These batts will be a little bit more tweedy, a little chunkier, but I’d rather sort that out while I’m spinning it um and not lose so much wool. um I mean there’s usually parts of the fleece that don’t make it into a smooth yarn, but I’m going to try to get as much of this fleece as possible into these yarns. That’s the plan. Probably won’t oo- just move the camera, why don’t you. I probably won’t start carting this fleece until this weekend. Today’s a Thursday. I have school stuff I have to get done um, but I will probably break that out over the weekend and at least get started with maybe one pillowcase and the- oh dog. Anyway I’ll get started on some of that this weekend and uh continue from there.

It is July 16th 2022. So a couple of weeks ago, I finished up carding the remaining amount of fleece that I had washed and ready to go. I now have approximately five pillow cases worth of carded fleece and I have spun just about all of the fleece that I combed out before I started carding it. So now that that’s all done, I’m ready to just spin away, which is good. And this is the amount of fleece waste that I have from the carding process. This is fleece that got tangled up on the carding rolls, that was too short to really catch and hang on to the batts, um stuff that I could possibly use but it would be much harder to use it. This bag is approximately 248 g which is about 8.7 oz, um and looks to be about the same as the waste fleece that I had after I decided to stop combing. So for this particular fleece with the way that I was combing them, I was generating a lot more waste um that wasn’t going to be used. The carding seems to be much more efficient for this particular fleece and yeah. I’m going to get rid of this. This is going to go up in the woods so that animals can use it.