I've been talking to a woman who grew cotton in the Willamette valley a couple years ago: http://oregoncotton.wordpress.com, and I have also been planing a trip to fiber mills such as Pendleton and Fantasy Fibers near Portland and Creekside Fiber Mill near Corvallis. Also, I've been spinning.
Spinning is the key step to turn a fleece into textile material (unless of course you are a felter, then ignore me). Spinning makes all the rest make so much more sense to me, gives me a greater appreciation of what comes after spinning, and a better understanding of what to do and why before spinning. Buying a ball of red heart yarn from Fred Meyers doesn't make you feel like you know what it takes to get something from the back of a sheep to a hat or sweater or baby blanket. After spinning, I know what to look for when I'm skirting a fleece, and what is “good enough”. Spinning makes me understand the importance of carding and take more time and effort on every step of preparing the fleece. With weaving, dressing the loom takes all the time in the world, and the actual weaving goes fast. Likewise, all the time goes in to preparing the fiber so spinning will be enjoyable.
So to give you all, my readers, people like my mum, a better understanding of everything I've been learning, I'm going to take you from sheep to shawl, as I understand it, focusing on all the different tools as I go through the fiber worlds.
Sheep: Sometimes sheep have blankets to keep them from getting dirty, sometimes it's just careful caretakers who always keep the hay in the feeding troughs and off the heads of the sheep. Sometimes the sheep get a reverse-shop-vac hair blower before they get their new dews. However we can, we try to keep those silly animals as clean as is reasonable.
Sheering: People have all kinds of snazzy equipment for sheering, from swings to lean over, to special lights and clipper stands, sometimes a sheep stand, mats... The important things are really the electric buzzers and a big pair of sheers that look like two big kitchen knives gorilla-taped on to a big metal sprig... pretty scary looking. Once the fleece gets off the sheep, it goes in to labeled plastic bags with firsts, seconds, and thirds (best, okay, really dirty) going in separate bags. Or maybe the thirds can skip the bag and go straight to the garbage or compost.
Skirting: Ideally, the fleeces would immediately be skirted, but some times things are busy, there aren't enough people, and it takes a while to get around to. To skirt, we stretch the fleece across a big mesh skirting table (or a wire pick-nick table or whatever we have). If we're feeling really dedicated, we might even break out the tweezers... lets hope the blankets and blower worked well enough that we don't have to do that too much. If you're showing the fleece, this is as far as you need to go, though you'll be taking a nice long time with those tweezers. If you are felting, you can also probably come up with reasons to stop here.
Washing: Next the less chunky fleece gets divided into mesh, zippered laundry bags (like the kind you might use if you had some fancy langere...) They then get soaked with soap in hot water, some times in a bucket, sometimes a sink, sometimes a specially broken and altered washing machine that promises not to agitate the fleece. Hang or lay flat to dry.
Carding: Once the fiber is good and dry, it's not really fleece any more, it's fiber or wool or whatever else and it's about to become even more things. Also, this is where I started thinking about all the special tools. I call this section carding, but first there is plucking. If you're really lucky, you might even get to use a plucking machine which is a bunch of swinging spikes, more or less, that pulls the fiber apart. Of course, using your hands to pull it apart works just find too. Once the fiber is nice and loose, and even more of the little bits of stuff have fallen out, it can finally get carded into a bat with an electric carder, a hand carder, or a couple of carding paddles (which are pretty much the same thing as a dog brush but really expensive, so if you are like me, dog brushes work just fine). Carding gets all the fiber combed out to be going the same direction and makes a nice little blanket of wool. Oh! Also at this time, the batting could get turned in to roving, which is a long thin bat, and makes spinning that much easier. The big industrial machines do a nice job at this, though by hand, there's not much advantage now rather than right before spinning.
Spinning: So we used the picker and the carder, and now we get to spin the bats or roving into yarn. First we spin single threads either with a spinning wheel, or drop spindle or on your leg, or whatever then take the spools off, and ply (twist) together two or three together into a yarn. If we take two plied yarns and put them together, we can make a cord. Once there is something satisfactory on the spool or bobbin, Then we use a niddy noddy to take the yarn off the bobbin and form it into a skein (big coil or loop). The skein goes on to the umbrella swift, and then can be wound off of that with a little over-priced, plastic ball winder. Now all that fiber is finally ready to be dressed on to a loom, cast on to a pair of knitting needles, or to simply pick up with a crochet hook.
(I don't have regular internet so posts tend to come in bunches, sorry)
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