Skirt(ing) Work

I first learned the term "skirt work" from one of my favorite blogs, Just Another Day on the Prairie.  I'd not previously been aware of this...probably because cooking, cleaning, ironing, grocery shopping...ain't my strong suit.  So much.  Linda's got that and all the "jeans wearing" ranch work under control out there with beautiful photography as well.  Around these parts I use skirt work to refer to skirting raw fleeces after shearing ;-). 

While ideally it's best to skirt straight off the shearing platform, at the time, we just quickly pick up each fleece and wrap it in a breathable cotton sheet, tag it, set it to the side and bring out the next sheep to be shorn.  Skirting comes later when I have time to relax and enjoy it.  Guess who's next up :-).

Over the years I've set up my skirting table in several locations.  In front of the Wool House is too uneven.  Behind the Wool House can be a wind tunnel.  In the barn aisle, too dark.  Why I never thought to set it up behind the barn, I have no idea. 

Earlier this spring when I was trying to get Maisie acclimated to living outside, I set up the table in the little lamb pen so we could hang out together and she could have fun exploring around, eat green grass Without Eating My Flowers that were starting to come up, plus, she's great company.  As were all the rest of the sheep, who were fascinated by what I was doing.  I love my sheeps :-).  This is a perfect spot.

Our table is simply a cattle panel with wire mesh stretched over, cable/wire tied together and then the pokey edges are covered in pipe insulation.  It sits on two saw horses and there are two boards underneath that stabilize and support the length. This is a good size, not impossible for me to move by myself, stores up against a wall, out of the way.  There are many different and maybe better designs out there...

So after I dump the fleece from the sheet onto the table I try to unroll/untangle it from how it was picked up.  Again, ideally there is a right and wrong way to gather a fleece.  However, some of ours are so big (Renny, Lila, Petunia...) that it's all we can do just to try to pick it up at all.  The good folks can pick up a fleece, walk over to the skirting table and fling it, like magic, into the air and it will come down properly laid out.  I've seen this on video.  Yes.

This is one of those huge fleeces.  I was able to pretty quickly get it laid out with the head facing us and the tail facing Maisie.  The "fuzzy" fleeces hold together pretty well.  The "curly" longwool fleeces don't and that's why I use the smaller wire mesh, so the individual curls don't fall through.  This was the day that I took the pictures of Maisie and Betsy along the fence :-).

First off I go around the outside and pull off anything that is too dirty.  This corner, tossed.  I also pull off much of the britch wool, which is the coarser, longer wool found on the lower back legs/hip area.  Some sheep have more britch wool than others and if it's significantly different from the rest of the fleece, I'd toss it. 

Here we have dirty tips, straw and see the grayish clumps on the right of this picture?  Second cuts.  If you biggify I think it will show that not only are these short, but also hairy, probably from around the face or maybe the legs.  That will be prickly if it gets mixed into the wool, so toss it.

These short pieces are probably not second cuts, but from shorter wool up around the face.  Still, I'd toss them as they're significantly different than the rest of the fleece, the longer lock.

Hopefully if you biggify this photo, you'll see why I included it.  I should have circled the area packed full of hay.  This is usually just around the top of the neck (unless you are Boudreaux ;-).  Sometimes I try to pick it out, but on this large fleece I just grabbed that small area and, yep, tossed it.

Now this would be a clue to me as to who this sheep was just in case her tag got misplaced.  Burs.  From a particularly adventurous sheep ;-).  I used to think burs meant a fleece was ruined.  I've since learned that while they are painful to pick out at this point, once the fleece has started the wash process they slide right out.  I wouldn't sell a fleece like this, but if you ever run across burs, just wait to remove them until the wool is wet.

Now, once most of the bad stuff has been removed I fold one side over the middle.

Oops, more second cuts.  With larger holes in your skirting table, these second cuts tend to go ahead and fall through.  With my small holes, they don't as much and I just grab them as I see them.  You can also shake the fleece to encourage them to fall out, but I don't do much of that until I get ready to wash as I like being able to roll the fleece up for storage and every time I shake one, it's never quite the same.

So, fold one side over, then the other over the top.

Start rolling from the tail to the head.

And stuff it in a bag.

Yep, that's Blossom!  Her fleece has since been washed and already back from the mill - beautiful bright white sproingy roving.  I'm going to keep at least half of it since it's her "baby locks", but might sell the other half at the Kentucky Sheep and Fiber Festival next week.  I'm pretty happy with my fleeces and roving this year and hoping anyone who's coming out will be as well :-).

Ack!!!  One thing I just realized I didn't include here is testing for fleece soundness.  This is important for a handspinning fleece.  You'll want to make sure the structure of the fleece itself is strong with no weak spots due to stress from illness, lambing...  The other spot to check is the tips.  Especially on lamb fleeces, the tips can be fragile and that could cause trouble during carding.  This is probably a whole 'nuther post and I've got to get back to "blue jean" work...so "to be continued".

Anatomy Of A Nap

Another one of those super cute lambies from Flat Creek Wool and Pottery.

Natural Dyeing, Spinning, Weaving

I got the privilege of going out to Tanglewood Farm this afternoon to take some pictures from day two of Dianne's natural dye workshop taught by Dagmar Klos, author of The Dyer's Companion.  No surprise, the venue, hostess, instructor, students, subject matter...were all beyond outstanding.  I can't wait to see their final results.

 

As I was reviewing my photographs I found a whole series of foggy morning shots I'd taken here a couple days ago and almost forgotten about.  A little of nature's colorwork with some intricate spinning and weaving thrown in to freak Karen out because you know I love my spiders :-).

Just Enough Knowledge To Be Dangerous

When I was combing wool for the Sunday Stills - Hand Tools post a few weeks ago, I kind of enjoyed working with the combs and that wool, but was kind of beating myself to death doing it and once again thought "maybe this wool combing just isn't for me". 

I have a couple friends that are combing fools though so I figured, as with most things, I either didn't have the right tools for the job or didn't know how to use them correctly.  I happened to see a combing workshop at the Fiber Event in Greencastle just the next week so I signed up and hit the road.

The class was taught by Nancy de Caprariis of Sheep Street Fibers.  Not only was she an enjoyable and knowledgeable instructor, but she also brought a bunch of different sizes, types, brands... of combs and we tried them all.  That's exactly what I needed.  I ended up coming home with a smaller, lighter weight set of two pitch combs and a better understanding of how to use them.

This is a very special fleece I've been saving for several years.  It was from a dear Jacob lamb that was not with us very long, less than a year.  We had to have her put down when her kidneys finally failed and after the vet left I decided to shear her so maybe I could make something from/for her.

I divided her fleece into three main piles - mostly black, mostly white and some of each.

It was short to begin with and sheared through many tears, which didn't help matters any.

Under normal circumstances, no one would have thought to ever use this fleece.  I knew my only hope was combing.

Here I'm making a light gray blend.  I picked out what I hoped was the right color combination and placed it on the new combs.

Being by myself, I can't think of any way to show you exactly how the combs work so we'll just leave it as you use one comb to comb through the fiber on the other and the good fiber ends up sticking on the second comb...

...and the original comb is left with the ratty stuff, which you discard.

After a second pass through.  See how nice and neat and smoothly blended?  There are still some funky bits on the other comb so I discarded them and made one more pass.

Then, and I have no idea how to explain how/why this works, but you stick a tiny bit through a hole in your fancy handmade wooden diz that you can't find so you make a temporary one out of an empty plastic beer cheese container lid and start pulling and out comes a long piece of ready to spin "top".  Magic.

Did I mention the beer cheese container was empty?  Just checking ;-). 

Here I'm making a medium gray.

See all the bits and pieces and scraps of hay that's removed?  This would card terribly, but combed out...

...beautiful.

I mixed different amounts of black and white together and ended up with six different colors all from one sheep, Sunshine.  My plan is to spin this for a Kate Davies Sheep Heid hat.  I think the Jacob sheeps can give those silly Shetlands a run for their money ;-).  Ideally I'd like to have the yarn spun in time to enter it in the skein competition at the rapidly approaching Kentucky Sheep and Fiber Festival, but we'll have to see.

Speaking of the festival and different breeds of sheep, Deb Robson, one of the authors of  The Sheep and Fiber Sourcebook (yes, that awesome big red book) is teaching a two day workshop this year.  Talk about  some inspiration and better tools in your tool box! Here is a link to her class and several others interesting offerings. 

Sunshine

The Crazy House

And for once it's not the house where we live!

On the Wool House porch.

I'd click to biggify.  This one is a classic!