How to Scour Raw Wool Fleece

Hello, my name's Marina and in this video I'm going to be sharing with you how to scour or wash wool fleece. So this is going to be the first in a series of videos that I'm hoping to record on fibre processing from taking raw fibre materials to a finished fabric or garment. So this is the very first stage in processing wool once it has been shorn off the sheep and I have here a very glamorous bag of the fleece that I'm going to be washing. This is a Shetland Tees Watercross. It's got a fairly long staple length and I'm hoping to dye this and then I'll blend it with some other fibres and then I will hopefully process it ready for weaving. So today the first step is just to wash the fleece to get it ready for dyeing and I'm going to show you that process. I'm using one of my dye pots to wash this fleece in. You want something that has a good amount of space for the fleece to move around in but you don't want anything that you would otherwise use for cooking. I have a completely separate set of utensils but you could also use a bucket. I'm filling the pot here with really quite hot water. I've added water from the kettle as well as from the hot tap. This needs to be hotter than you would want to put your hand in and I have finished running the water before putting the fleece in because you don't want running water to go over the fleece. The key thing at this stage is that the fleece can felt quite easily and that is caused by sudden changes of temperature and excessive agitation which is why I am using my very sophisticated implement, the stick, to gently push the fleece under the water without stirring it and that stays in there for 15 to 30 minutes until there is a good amount of grime in the water. You can see there that the water is full of a lot of the lanolin and the dirt that's coming out of the fleece. Now in this first wash I've just used hot water and for the next one I'm going to use detergent. I'm going to use washing up liquid here but you can also use a specific scouring agent like Uginicorn Power Scour for example which I've used in the past and it's excellent. However I don't have any to hand at the moment and the washing up liquid does fine. So this here is the final rinse. So I have done the first wash with just the hot water then two subsequent ones with the washing up liquid and this is another one with hot water just to rinse out traces of detergent. You can wash the fleece as many times as you need to to get all of the dirt out. If it's come from a sheep that has lived in a barn over winter and hasn't been exposed to lots of mud then it might be a lot cleaner and not need as many washes or if it's a really mucky one you might need to do some additional washes. And again just to dry gently shake some of the water out and press very gently down on the fleece in the colander. And then one of the main things that annoys me about washing fleece is having to find space to dry it. So I tend to squeeze some of the water out first because it means that it's not going to be as drippy. So I have a set of towels that are mucky ones for things like cleaning fleece and it doesn't really matter if they get a bit mucky. And so I'm just spreading out the fleece so that I can roll it up in the towel and then squeeze it a bit. Now this isn't going to dry it completely but it will take away a lot of the water that is sitting there which means that it'll dry much faster and it won't be as drippy. This is the same way that I would dry any knitwear or things made of wool so that you can avoid wringing them because again you have the issue with it possibly felting or stretching out of shape and somehow damaging the fibres. So then once I have squeezed it out a fair bit you can see there's a lot of water in the towel now. That fibre is still quite damp but it won't drip all over the place so you could leave it out if you just had a tabletop or a bit of space on the floor you can leave it out on a fresh dry towel. I tend to put it over the bath because I happen to have a clothes horse that fits on there nicely and it means that you get really good airflow underneath the fleece and the more airflow you can get the faster it's likely to dry and it means that you don't end up with issues like it going mouldy which is only really likely to happen if you have a very humid environment and it's left for quite a long time without drying so you just want to spread out the fleece as much as you can ensure good air circulation and then leave it aside until it's dry and I hope this will need to move if we need a shower before it's dry but otherwise it's a great place to put it. I left the fleece drying overnight and because it's winter here we've got the heating on and so it is dried really nice and quickly I'll just show you here I'm going to get bits of fleece everywhere I'm quite pleased with how it's turned out you can see that the fibres where they were all clumped together with the dirt and lanolin are quite open and fluffy now there are still areas where there's a little bit of dirt on the tips of the locks if I were going to be using the fleece as it is so undyed I would probably separate out areas of this and just give those slightly dirtier areas another rinse but I'm quite aware that because I'm going to be naturally dyeing these that requires quite a few more stages of putting the fleece in hot water and taking it out again requires quite a lot of manipulation which is sort of stressful for the fibres and so I'm quite conscious that I don't want to over process them so the key thing is that we've got rid of a lot of the lanolin which is what will prevent the dye from sticking to the fibre and that is really pretty so there is a tiny bit in certain areas of a yellow tone just where because this is quite an old fleece some of the lanolin has caused a little bit of staining but again because I'm going to be dyeing this I am not too bothered about that because it's all going to be covered up anyway and so the next stage is going to be dyeing the fleece with plants from my garden I'm going to be filming that in a separate video so if you would like to keep up with this project then please do subscribe to my channel and if you want to see some more things that I'm up to you can check out my podcast which comes out monthly at the moment and I also have a Patreon channel which helps support these videos and provides extra bonus content every month and so until next time I hope you give washing fleece a go and I will see you then!