Getting Fleeced - the Old Fashioned Way

This week, our class made a trip to the Exchange Place in Kingsport, TN. I'll be sharing the pictures I took later on, but for today, let me just give you a brief synopsis of what Exchange Place is before moving on to my main topic for the day. Exchange Place is a living history farm that was first established in the early 19th century and is open to the public for tours, festivals, and much, much more, thanks to the dedication of its many volunteers. It is a terrific place to visit - I'd highly recommend a trip if you've never been.

Right now I'm going to focus on one small element of our tour which struck me with a much greater impact than it would have even a month ago. Wool. Notice the charming little basket of nicely washed raw wool sitting next to the bench in the picture below. It looks very harmless, doesn't it? 

That's what I would have supposed, too....before my fleecing. A few weeks ago, I wouldn't have paid a second's attention to a basket of wool, but if I had, it would probably only have been to wonder what the two "dog brushes" were doing sitting on top of a pile of wool. And then I would've moved on, blissfully ignorant of what that little basket and that pair of "dog brushes" represented in terms of labor and time. 

Now I know better. See, I recently decided to take up making a particular kind of doll known as the Waldorf doll. If you click on the name, you can find out more about this type of doll, but the most important part about it, at least for this conversation, is the fact that it is stuffed with wool. 

Well, I quickly found that wool can be a bit pricey, so in order to make the enterprise a bit more affordable, I decided to buy a raw fleece. I mean, how hard could cleaning some raw wool be? And I was amazed at how cheaply I was able to get one - it was less than $30 through eBay for a seven pounder. You know how they say that life turns on a dime? Well, in this case, it was the click of a mouse that did it.

I know what you're thinking, that I am being a bit melodramatic, and I agree - I would've thought the exact same thing...before the fleece arrived. But let me just say that until you've processed your own raw sheep fleece, you have NO idea, and for your sake, I would do all in my power to keep it that way. 

But, I digress. I ordered my fleece and received it a week ago last Friday. I was so excited to open the box and get a look at my purchase. I was not prepared for what I was about to see. 

Now that is just ugly. I guess I didn't really remember how dirty sheep get. And this fleece had been skirted before it was sent to me, meaning that all of the nasty manure-stained bits had been mostly cut away - I'd hate to have seen it BEFORE the skirting was done - I was pretty daunted by the look of it in this condition.

What follows is the process I have gone through to get the fleece to where it is right now (more on its current status later). After this, I think you'll share my increased admiration for the hard work that these early settlers had to put in to almost everything they did!

Okay, so first I donned a pair of rubber gloves (something the settlers would not have had - poor blokes) and started shaking out the fleece to get the biggest chunks and pieces of "debris" out.

Next, I started pulling the fleece apart in small sections to loosen some more of the veggie matter, manure, and bugs that were trapped in the wool. The result of this is what you see in these three wire baskets.

The contents of these baskets represent approximately four hours of work, and only about an eighth of the actual fleece. The rest, I set aside for later.

My next task was to take a couple of buckets inside and fill them with the hottest water the tap could produce. To fill two buckets in this way took me about ten minutes - the poor settlers would have had to pump the water, or get it from the well, and then heat it in a cauldron making this step even longer.

The settlers also didn't have Dawn dish soap - I imagine they would've used lye soap, and probably would've had to make it - another thing that I am grateful to have been spared having to do as I proceeded. I dumped in a good handful of the soap into each bucket and then lowered (slowly so as not to felt my wool) the mesh containers full of picked wool into the hot water.

Following the advice of the many experts available online (what did settlers do without Google?!), I set my timer for 20 minutes and let the wool stew away.

After the timer went off, I (again, carefully) removed the wire baskets from the hot water. Below is the result.

Not too clean looking, right? Right. So...again following the advice of the online wool cleaning experts, I repeated the washing process another two times. Then, I had to "rinse" the wool twice, which meant filling buckets two more times with hot water and letting the wool soak for another twenty minutes each time. At this point, the washing process for the first two batches of wool has taken approximately two and a half hours. 

Next task was to dry the wool. Easier said than done as wool really likes to retain moisture. I decided to rig up an old piece of screen and tie it to two pool floaties - spread the wool in a thin layer over that and then cover with our little fire pit cover. I'm sure that the settlers had a much better way to do this - I left this wool out for over 24 hours and it still remained pretty damp.

Finally, the wool dried, and this was the result. Two small wire baskets of washed wool. Now I just had to repeat the entire process several more times over the next three days to get the rest of the fleece washed.

I learned two very important shortcuts after my first few batches of wool. First, was that soaking the wool in plain water over night cut down the number of times I had to wash it to two times, rather than three. This is something the settlers would've been smart enough to do from the start, of course. 

The second expedient that I discovered after even more online research, was that using a Salad Spinner to spin out the excess water from the fleece before putting it out to dry cut down the drying time immensely. I feel very bad for the settlers over this one as I'm pretty sure they didn't have an early-American version of one of these little miracles at their disposal.

I then got the bright idea to put the wire baskets of wool fresh from the Salad Spinner in front of a fan (another blessing of the Electric Age) to finish the drying process.

To wash and dry one fleece using all of the modern conveniences at my disposal, still took seven days and easily fifty hours. And that doesn't even bring us to the point of those fluffy white pieces of wool that we saw lying in the basket at the Exchange Place - oh no, we are not there yet. Washed wool is still FULL of vegetable matter (VM) - little tiny pieces of grass and grain - that have to be worked free from the very grabby wool fibers. 

The next phase of the process is to again pick apart the wool fibers, a handful at a time, to loosen them and release as much remaining VM as possible. Once this is done, the "dog brushes" that we saw in the earlier picture from the Exchange Place come into play. The brushes are actually hand carders, and they are used to brush the wool fibers out so that they are all lined up in one uniform direction. This process helps to free the remaining VM from the wool and prepares it for the task of spinning. 

Hand carders are expensive - a good pair will cost you about $50-60, so I decided to use the next best (and cheapest) thing - dog brushes. The only essential difference between wire dog brushes and hand carders is their size. Dog brushes are MUCH smaller, but they only cost about $2.50 each at the dollar store, so I decided that smaller was just fine with me.

To hand card (according to my online expert friends), you grab a small amount of washed and picked wool and run it across the bristles of one brush until the brush is covered in wool.

You then brush the wool with the other brush (several times if needed) until all of the VM is out and the fibers are lined up in a satisfactory manner.

The above picture represents several hours of labor and about 1.5 ounces of wool. Since that picture was taken on Thursday, I have carded an additional two ounces of wool. I am getting faster - it only took me about an hour and a half to do that much. At this rate, I should be done picking and carding my fleece by Christmas...of 2013. 

The lesson I've taken away from this experience is that I have it so much easier than the early settlers to this area did. I decided to undergo this process because I wanted to save money on a project that I am doing for fun, whereas the settlers of the 19th century had to do this same thing over and over just to live. Without wool, there was no cloth, and without wool cloth, there were no clothes or outerwear. 

In the harsh elements of an Appalachian winter, outerwear was a must - a farmer wouldn't last long if he caught a cold, or worse yet, pneumonia, because he wasn't properly insulated against the weather. If a farmer lost his life, then his family would be hard-pressed to keep up a farm in a land that was, in many cases, far from the aid of family and friends.