Processing the Wool

So being the crafty addict that I am, I’d always planned to have sheep and grow my own wool (and meat).  When we first moved here, I was on the look out for a spinning wheel.  I found one cheaply on Trade Me that only needed a new drive string - very cheaply as it turned out, I paid $50 for this and they sell new for between $500 and $600!

My spinning wheel.

At the time, I had no wool to spin and started to look for that on Trade Me too.  There were so many new to me technical terms on there that I was just confused.  95% vm free - uh huh.  Alpaca Saddle Fleece - yup, sure.  Top 20.5 microns - I’m guessing that’s the thickness of a strand?  Skirted fleece - nah, lost me completely.  Then I was given a bag of llama wool from one of Hubby’s workmates.  Awesome, just what I needed.

The next thing though, according to all the information I had, was to card it.  I read through books that described the process using combs and cat brushes.  I just got a big mess.  I mentioned it to a neighbour, who told me that some people spin without carding and do just fine.  I started to play with it and practice.  It was uneven and a bit messy, but I got there.  I made a pair of socks out of my first spinning efforts.

Llama wool socks.

I hadn’t realised that plying is essential.  A single strand doesn’t have any flexibility or real strength, my socks were warm but stiff and soon wore big holes.  I played with plying my yarn with some wool I’d been given - I have several skeins of single spun (unplyed?  Whatever the techie term is) wool, but mixing royal blue with brown looked like a terrible choice in carpet wool.

I finally bought another bobbin so that I could ply the wool I was spinning and bought a lazy kate to go with them and make this task so much simpler.  I was off and spinning.

A friend gave me a big fadge (one of those big square wool sack things) full of alpaca fleece that she had knocking around from when she used to have alpacas.  She said it was probably a bit mothy and freezing it before use might be a good idea.  It took me a while to get it out and even think about working with it.  I’d been given another couple of boxes of yarns etc by my Mum when she was clearing out Grandma’s old stuff.

I finally decided to check out youtube for carding - why hadn’t I thought of that before?  It took a while before I found someone showing the techniques for flick carding - another technical term, this time it’s using a small single carding brush like a cat brush.  But find it I did and suddenly it all made sense.  I started to flick card the alpaca fleece.  There seemed to be a lot of wastage.  The moths had been at the fleece and so there were lots of small short locks that were nearly impossible to flick card adequately and other small bits that just broke off and left me covered in a layer of fine fluff.

Alpaca fleece with the cat brush (at the bottom of the pic).

Then we had these two feed sacks of sheep’s wool from my sheep.  They needed some sort of processing, the dog kept pulling it out of the sacks and chewing on the daggy bits that had somehow made it into the bag too. 

I found another youtube video about washing the fleece - something else that seems to be poorly described in my otherwise wonderful books.  I spent about an hour picking through maybe quarter of the fleece I had, pulling out dried poo, trimming off the daggy dark bits and picking out most of the grass and seed (otherwise known as vm - vegetable matter).  I filled the laundry sink with hot hot water, a very liberal amount of dishwashing liquid and then my fleece.  I left it to soak overnight.  The water was a hideous light brown colour and the small amount of foam had gone a bit manky and fatty.  I let the water out, carefully holding my wet fleece away from the plug hole and refilled it.  The water immediately went slightly brown again, so I added more dishwash and left it to soak again.  The next time, the water stayed pretty clear, so I let it rinse until it was nearly cold and drained out the water.  I threw the whole lot into the washing machine and put it on spin to take out any excess water.

It was a very hot sunny day, so I spread the fleece out on the glass topped outdoor table to dry.  As it dried, I sat down with my cat brush and started to flick card it.  This did make it seem to dry quicker but I spent hours at it and barely made a dent in the pile.  This was proving to be a huge exercise in frustration more than anything else.

Washed fleece drying in the sun

I jumped online and had a look at Trade Me again.  It’s my go-to for anything I need, although I have learned to check first what things are actually worth new in the shops!  Some people just go a bit crazy in the bidding competition type thing and suddenly a used item sells for more than twice it’s worth.  There was a drum carder (worth $570+ new) that closed in 5 hours and was only sitting at $21.  I placed an autobid of $50 - it immediately jumped to $51.  Someone else had an existing autobid for more.  So I went straight to my maximum of $75 and it jumped to $76.  When it finally closed, it went for $137 which was still a bloody good deal, just more than I was willing to spend.

My new hand carders - absolute life savers!

I rang Hubby and asked him if he could stop in at Hands in town and pick up a set of wool carders for me.  I knew they were $75 there and would be far more efficient than my tiny cat brush.  He agreed and asked me to ring and have them put away at the counter for him as he had no clue what to look or ask for!

He came home with my new carders and I’ve been madly making rolags since.  Rolags is yet another technical term for a roll of carded fleece.  It is much quicker, far less wastage and makes spinning the fleece a whole lot easier.  Even the shorter alpaca fleece is spinning up far more evenly than I’ve been able to manage up till now.

A bag full of Alpaca fleece rolags

Another fabulous idea I saw recently in another blog (do check out the whole blog - Anna is lovely, very clever and the Mum of one of Miss Eight's closest friends) was to make a duvet inner from carded wool.

I guess the next thing is to figure out what I’ll be making with all the lovely, homespun, slightly uneven wool.  And to play with natural dyes.  And maybe some felting.  And weaving.  We’ll see.

Shearing Sheep

As I mentioned in my last post, we bought 3 sheep a few months ago.  I went vaguely through the process of slaughtering and butchering and tanning the sheepskin from our wether Lamb Chop.  But what about the other two?

Miss Eight offering Nibbles some treats.

When we got them, they all needed dagging and shearing, so I went and bought a pair of dagging shears.  Fortunately for us, Nibbles was hand-raised and if you go into her paddock with a bucket, she thinks you have treats (pig nuts) for her and will come over to see you and can be quite easily caught.  Unfortunately, while we were shown how to flip a sheep over, we obviously missed bits of the technique and struggled to do it ourselves.  I got half a leg dagged before she started to kick and then we couldn’t catch her again.  A timely visit from friends with plenty of experience meant we were able to get Nibbles at least dagged.  It was a very rough job, but it was done.  He also told us about the guys who will go out to lifestyle blocks like ours with a fully mobile set up and shear a small number of sheep, although it might work out to be quite expensive for our tiny flock.

Dagging Nibbles with some help from a friend.

I started to ask around various friends with small flocks and I was told to check out the Hotline - our local small newsletter that is mostly local service advertising.  I found an ad for a mobile setup shearer.  He was really apologetic about having to charge their minimum rate for fully shearing only two sheep and dagging another, but given that he came in the evening in his own time, when his wife was only weeks away from having their first baby and was here for an hour, I thought that $50 wasn’t bad at all.

We tried to drive them into the sheep yards in the corner of the front paddock.  The run, as you can see in the photo is in a state of disrepair.  This was caused in part by poorly thought out construction, and partly by a steer who got in and couldn’t get out so he kicked the end gate to pieces before we were able to rescue him from it.  The yards themselves are okay, but the gate is not a practical design.  The bottom board rests on the ground, so if the grass has grown up in front of it, it’s nearly impossible to open.  The wooden frame work is getting a bit old and not really up to the whole weight of the gate either.

Trying to drive a hand-raised sheep and two lambs is not an easy thing either.  Being hand-raised means that she isn’t particularly worried about us, she’ll duck through a gap that other sheep wouldn’t try.  Even with five of us, we couldn’t do it and gave up after a couple of hours of frustration and swearing.  The shearer wasn’t too worried, the paddock narrows down to little more than a lane at the other end and he thought he could catch them there.  He was right.

I could no longer tell which of the lambs was which, so I asked him to only dag Lamb Chop the wether as I was planning to use his skin with the fleece.  He was quite tickled by the idea, he’s more used to seeing lifestyle farmers who aren’t quite so resourceful with all the leftover bits of their animals.  He caught one of the lambs first.  Miss Eight was sure he had Lamb Chop and told him so, he stopped and checked and quite frankly said to her “No, there’s no penis, this is the girl one.”  Miss Eight set off into a fit of giggles but accepted his wisdom.

We were rather impressed by his mobile gear.  He had a battery charged clipper unit that he simply tucked into an apron/wide tool belt.  It clips slower than a full power unit, so he takes his time but  did a lovely job.

Two feed sacks full of wool (a bit daggy in places but will be sorted later and we were astounded at how much smaller Nibbles and Sheepy-sheepy (long story) looked in comparison to Lamb Chop.  The shearer also commented that they were the healthiest small flock he’d seen on a lifestyle block.  No sign of fly-strike, feet all good and he’d be really shocked if they did just turn their toes up as we’d been told sheep do.  Hubby passed that on to his boss (who we’d bought the sheep from) who put it down to giving them treats of pig nuts.

Lamb!

Around October, Hubby came home and asked if we wanted sheep.  This inspired a 'look' from me.

We've talked about sheep but have been a little afraid of them.  We keep hearing things from the local sheep farmers like "If you have one, you might as well have a hundred" - because they're a lot of work and "they have this tendency to just die for no apparent reason, the trick is to try and keep them alive for long enough to make a few bob off them."

When you have hundreds (or in some case thousands) of sheep, losing the odd one is probably not much of an issue.  For us, losing one is losing a fairly big investment comparatively.  So I've been a bit wary.

Hubby's boss had a ewe and two lambs he needed to sell and offered them to us for $240.  He told us she was an escape artist and she was teaching her lambs all the tricks.  I asked him if he was setting us up for failure - if she's escaping from his place, why should our place be any better?

He has the five strand cattle fencing, we have the netted sheep and deer fencing, we should be okay.

We managed to squeeze Nibbles and her lambs into the back of my tribute (although it was a long, smelly and occasionally noisy drive) and brought them to their new home where they settled in quite quickly.

One of the lambs was a wether, so it was decided that he'd be Christmas dinner.  Our local homekill man won't come out for just one lamb though.  We could slaughter it ourselves and drop it in to him to process but if we'd done that part, we might as well do the rest.

I started doing my research and thought I had it fairly well sussed, but we both worried a bit about the possibility of botching the actual kill.  Not only would my poor animal suffer needlessly if I did it wrong, but it would also make the meat tough.  After some discussion, we called the neighbour who was quite happy to come over and take us through it with our first one.

I told Hubby he needed to be there for it.  I've been present for all our homekills, I feel I owe it as a mark of respect to the animal I've raised to witness this but also it's something I believe to be missing from modern society.  People are removed from where their food comes from and this is just as important a part of the process as everything else.

Miss Eight (she's had a birthday not so long ago) was keen to be there too.  I did warn her that it might be a bit frightening or gross but she was not worried so she came along too.  The neighbour tied the front two legs and one of the back ones together.  He explained that many people are injured because they just don't expect the kicking and thrashing that just slaughtered animals do.  I'd seen it before with the pigs - I saw them shot and dropped, but when they're bleeding out there are all the muscle and nerve twitches that go on.  One of my pigs looked like he was trying to stand and the other turned full somersaults.  They were dead and not suffering, but it is a bit unnerving the first time you see it.

Both Hubby and Miss Eight didn't think it was all that bad, I still maintain that this was because the legs were tied and the thrashing wasn't too noticeable.

The neighbour kept explaining things to Hubby - this is fairly standard, they all do that - until he realised that I was the one getting my hands dirty helping him skin and gut and sort through the bits for what we were going to keep.

I kept the skin, heart, liver and kidneys.  I was going to clean out the intestines for sausage casing but Hubby thought I had enough to do with this lamb and didn't need the extra work.  Being me, I'm quite proud that all the waste fitted inside one 20 litre paint bucket.

Butchering the next day was an eye opener for Hubby.  As he wrapped one of the legs, he asked how much I would have paid for that in the supermarket.  At least $50 - it was a full leg of at least 3kg.  He didn't believe me at first.  I told him that lamb averages about $25/kg (which he later verified).  Then he did all the maths - our 20+kg lamb would have cost $500 in the supermarket!  When are we getting more lambs?

Hubby wanted his lamb's fry, but never got around to cooking it, so that went with the rest into the dog food.  I chopped the offal into cubes and put it in the slow cooker (on an extension cord outside on the deck) with 2kg of mince and plenty of oats and rice for several hours.

I washed and trimmed the skin and tanned it.  We recently got a wonderful book (below hopefully if I can get the code to work) that includes several recipes for tanning skins.  I used the one made from baking soda and kerosene.  The problem was that it didn't tell you how you know when the skin is done.  I figured when I was scraping it all off the next day and getting damp kerosene out of the skin that it was a pretty good sign.  I left it stretched to allow the last of the kerosene to evaporate and it's looking perfect.  The skin is going to be slippers for me and we'll see what I do with the left over bits.  I'm already getting orders from everyone :)

Skin fairly fresh and new.

Skin after about a week of 'processing'.