I recently attended the Connecticut Sheep, Wool, and Fiber Fest. I went thinking I would only buy washed and prepped wool, but walked away with a six pounds (2.7 kg) Corriedale/Cormo/Romney cross raw fleece. A raw fleece is any fleece that has not been washed or otherwise prepared for crafting. Raw fleeces have only been sheared off the sheep and skirted to remove the unusable sections.
Have you recently bought a raw fleece and are wondering what to do next? Everyone has their own techniques of cleaning wool depending on their circumstances and fleece. However, this is my method of transforming raw fleece into clean wool.
Materials
- Bathtub or large container
- Hot water
- Wool washing detergent*
- Gloves
- Towels
- 3 Containers
- and an unwashed fleece of course
*You really do need detergent that is designed for washing woolens. Regular laundry detergent is alkaline and will damage wool. I use Eucalan because my local yarn store stocks it, but there are lots of great options out there.
Wool to Water Ratio
The first step is divide up the fleece. How you divide your fleece depends on the size, how dirty it is, and what you’re washing in. You want to have a high ratio of water to wool because even the cleanest fleece is still pretty dirty. Putting more wool into a bath is tempting. However, you’re not going to get ten pounds of wool clean in one bathtub. You’ll just have to wash it again.
My personal setup is a standard sized bathtub, approximately 40 gallons or 182 liters. With a moderately dirty fleece, I usually wash two pounds (.9 kg) of wool at a time. So my washing ratio is about one pound (.45 kg) of wool to 20 gallons (90 l) of water. If your fleece is exceptionally clean you can lower this ratio or vice versa for very dirty wool.
Since my moderately dirty fleece is six pounds (2.7 kg), I can only wash a third of it at a time. I needed to complete all of the following steps three times to wash the entire fleece.
Preparing for the Bath
Now that you have your wool divide up, it’s time to get it ready for its bath. You should begin by teasing the wool. Teasing is opening up the lock by gentling pulling it apart horizontally. A gentle teasing of the wool just gives the water easy access the lock and allows debris to fall out.
Teasing is a great time to pick out anything undesirable in the wool. This may be hay, bugs, second cuts, or, let’s be honest, poo. Even the best wool skirter in the world won’t find everything. The more debris you remove at this stage, the less you’ll have to pick out further along in the process.
You’ll want to fill your tub or container with very hot water, approximately 120° F or 49° C. The water needs to be hot enough to remove the lanolin, the greasy wax on raw fleece, but not so hot that it damages the wool. The water will be too hot to comfortably handle, so it’s a good idea to wear dishwashing gloves to protect yourself. Pour in a few tablespoons of your wool detergent.
Take the wool you’re going to wash in this session and further divide it into three piles. Since I wash two pounds (.9 kg) at a time, each of my piles should weigh about .6 pounds (.27 kg). For this explanation, I will call these piles 1, 2, and 3.
First Bath: The Horrific Filth of Wool
It’s now time to actually wash the wool! Put pile 1 into the water. Make sure all of the wool is wet, and then let it soak in the water for at least fifteen minutes. Even without agitation, you’ll start to see a dirty cloud forming around your wool.
You want to avoid excessively agitating the wool or you’ll watch your beautiful fleece turn into felt. However, you do want to encourage water to flow through the locks. I do this by moving the wool back and forth in the water. Using a gloved hand or a stick, I gently push the wool from one end of the tub to the other. Each trip takes about a minute to complete. I usually move the wool from end to end about three or four times. The water should be much dirtier now.
Now that the wool is cleaner, you can remove it from the bath. I use a strainer to capture the fibers and drain some of the water out. Give the wool a gentle squeeze to remove more of the water. You don’t want to dirty your second bath with lots of water from the first.
Using the same water, repeat the steps for wool pile 2 and 3. You may have to add more hot water to keep the temperature around 120° F or 49° C. The water will be horrifying once you are finished with pile 3. It will probably be opaque and a lovely shade of brown. I swear that all the wool will be clean by the end though!
You can now drain the tub. For the sake of your plumbing I recommend covering the drain with a strainer, some netting, or something similar. You don’t want wool going into your pipes! Give the tub a nice rinse to remove any sediment.
Second Bath: The Neutrality of Wool
Now it’s time for the second bath. Repeat the same steps as the first bath, using wool detergent and keeping the temperature around 120° F or 49° C. I like to ensure that each pile of wool gets a chance to go in the bath first. So for the second bath, I start with pile 2, then pile 3, and then pile 1.
I am always amazed how much cleaner the water is after the second bath. If your fleece is particularly dirty or greasy feel free to give it another hot bath with detergent. I once washed a mohair billy’s fleece that needed four detergent baths and a rinse.
Rinse Bath: The Supreme Beauty of Wool
Next is the rinse bath! Refill the tub with water without any detergent. You don’t need to be as fastidious about keeping the temperature quite as high. However, the bath should still be hot. This bath is to remove the detergent and any remaining dirt.
Some people do an acid wash as their final bath. They’ll add an acid, usually vinegar, to neutralize the alkalinity of the detergent. If you used a detergent designed for wool, this is unnecessary since the detergent is not alkaline. I would not recommend an acid wash because you could lower the pH of the bath too low and damage your fleece.
Rotate the piles of wool so that a different bundle goes into the bath first. If you only did two detergent baths, this means you should start with pile 3. Follow the same steps as you did for the earlier baths.
After washing all of the wool, the water should be clean…ish. You can spend all day washing your fleece to get every last speck of dirt out. But the more baths you do the more water and time you waste. Remember that your wool will be cleaned several more times before it becomes a jumper or a hat. You will wash and remove vegetable matter during carding, spinning, dyeing, knitting, and any other fiber processing. Perfection is the enemy of the good. Looking at the final bath, I wouldn’t drink the water. However, I don’t look at it and think gross.
Just like with the earlier baths, remove the wool and gently squeeze the water out.
Drying
The more water you remove from the wool now, the quicker it will dry. However, you don’t want to roll it around, rub it between your hands, or otherwise excessively agitate it. This is how you create felt.
This is my preferred method of removing extra water from wool (and my handwash garments as well). Lay a towel on the ground. Place strips of your fleece on the towel a few inches apart parallel to the short end of the towel. Roll up the towel short end to short end. When you unroll the towel the wool should no longer be sopping wet. Repeat with a new towel to dry the rest of your wool.
Next it’s time to leave your wool out to dry. There are a multitude of ways to accomplish this. The wool can be placed on any sort of mesh, screen, or fine fabric to maximize air flow and speed up drying. A sweater drying rack is ideal, but not necessary. I use the very technical and specialized equipment of a child safety gate placed over the bathtub. You can also use a fan to quicken drying, but make sure you don’t blow your wool away! Additionally, make sure to dry the wool where pets can’t reach it.
Leave the wool out to dry until you are absolutely sure that it’s dry. One of the benefits of wearing wool is that it feels dry even when it is slightly wet. However, when you’re trying to ensure that it’s dry this can be deceptive. If you put away wet wool, it could grow mold and need to be washed again.
The humidity was quite high the when I washed my fleece. Therefore, it took an entire week until I was completely certain that the fleece was dry enough to be packed away. Now your fleece is clean, dry, and ready to be made into something wonderful!
