Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Handspinners sometimes prefer to use fleece in its natural color, but only light colors will take dye. So darker
fleece can be more desirable or less depending on what you want to do.
(Photo courtesy of Emma Jane Hogbin)
Preparing a Fleece for Spinning
Shearing time produces a single fleece from each animal. Laid out flat, you can see all the fiber
that the animal has to offer, for better or for worse.
The process of removing undesirables is called
skirting
. The edges where the belly, neck, and legs
were will likely need to be removed, as will any short, straight hairs that interrupt those good-
quality fibers we talked about. Skirting your fleece will make a big difference in how your fleece
turns out. There's a huge difference between soft, consistent, downy products and scratchy, difficult
ones.
hand-harveSted FiberS vS. ShearinG
At one time, and still in some parts of the world, sheep and other fiber animals are brought indoors during
their shedding season. Restrained, their wool is combed and collected as it is shed, separating the soft
underside from the coarse outer hairs as it's gathered. The difference in the fibers is so marked, in fact, that
the fabrics discovered around the time that shears had been invented were entirely different from the
fabrics earlier on. Researchers speculated that coarser horse hairs or other fibers had been incorporated,
until they realized that people were simply shearing and using an entire fleece rather than separating the
soft wool from the coarse hairs.
