Hi-ho! Hi-ho! Off to the Mill I go!

yes, that's a black metal bed frame on the right...

This year's shearing was officially wrapped up on June 27th, but the fleeces sat around on my side porch for the duration of the Summer.  Embarrassing, really, but when one major job is finished around here, it seems there are three more urgently waiting.  This was something that I always meant to get back to.  And now that Winter is knocking at the door, we need to clean off the side porch and get it stacked with wood.

Each bag is one fleece (one sheep's worth).  Raw weight (which includes all the dirt and lanolin) is approximately 2-3 pounds per fleece.  Washing out the dirt lightens the fleece by a half pound.  And if I had to guess, I'd say one fleece will spin up into about 800 yards of two-ply, sweater weight yarn.

Since the weather was mild last week, I set up the skirting table outside and got to it.  My husband built me a large frame from 1x3s covered in mesh, similar to a screen door, that I can prop up on chairs (and bucket).  I lay a fleece on the screen and pick out all the bits of hay.  All the rubbish ends up on the ground.  I could make another whole sheep with all that rubbish!

Technically what I'm doing here is called "skirting."  Skirting is the process of removing the wool from around the entire outer edge.  This outer edge is the wool from the shoulders, belly and rump, and is typically the dirtiest.  After skirting through all those fleeces, I got a pretty good feel for the quality of my flock.   It became obvious which sheep had the longest fleece (Abner), which was starting to have a poorer quality fleece due to age (Knight and Mammy), and which one had the best coloring (Gretl's is gorgeous!).  Lambswool is the first fleece taken off a young sheep.  On our farm, sheep are sheared for the first time at one year of age.  These fleeces are very long and much softer than adult fleeces.

One positive side effect to having your hands buried in fleece all day is a good working in of lanolin (and dirt) which left my hands fairly soft.  The next step is taking all this to the mill to have it washed and carded so I can get some yarn spun.  The winter months are the perfect time to sit by the woodstove in the evenings, spinning and contemplating my next knitting project.  And I need to make a serious dent in all this wool because the next shearing is only six months away.  Hopefully we'll have the wood cleared off the porch by then so we can fill it up with wool again!