Sorting the fleece
Now that his sheep have been shorn, Graeme Bethune has the critical task of selecting the best fleece to turn into yarn
THE SHEEP have all been clipped now and look so clean and tidy, and the barn has big piles of fleeces waiting to be sorted. For a year, I have been working to get this crop of wool up to harvest; up to this point, everything has been focused on helping the sheepies produce the best possible raw material. Their work is done - now it’s over to me to do justice to this awesome fleece.
I am ruthless when sorting fleeces. There is no easier way to ruin all the hard work gone before than to compromise at this point. My philosophy is, “It’s better to have better, not more”. I would rather have 100 kilos of fleece I can be absolutely sure is the best quality, than 150 kilos that might contain the merely average. This will be the last time I get to have a serious personal influence on the quality of my yarns, and so I take my time.
I start with an attitude that I am looking for reasons to discard. This makes it easier to decide whether to keep or discard; if there is any doubt, I throw it away. Not all of a fleece, even the best one, will make the grade for yarns. The rest has other uses - it is not worthless or wasted, it’s just not right for yarn. I will get into this in depth another time.
How do you sort? Take nd a fleece and unroll it onto a big table. I have seen folks who can do this with panache, tossing the fleece so it lands nicely all spread out. If I tried this, it would be against the wall in a heap… I want to see and feel the entirety of the fleece.
Just like with food, the first evaluation is with the eye, and you can tell so much with a glance: colour, length of staple, poo and foreign object content. But how the fleece feels is your most important guide. Often a fleece just needs a quick grope and then it is tossed into the discard pile - an unsatisfactory fleece is easy to evaluate. But a good fleece needs careful examination.
First, I toss away the belly cut. This is, without fail, not worth even looking at. It’s filthy, full of debris, and the wool is hard and felted; it’s maybe 5-10% of the total weight of the fleece. Next up, the skirt: if you imagine the fleece as a jacket, the skirt is the edge that meets at the bottom of the sheep. This edge, like the belly, has spent its time in close contact with the ground, and is felted and full of stuff you don’t want (twigs, poo, straw and the like). So you feel for the transition between this soiled wool and the good part just above it, then you tear the bad from the good. Never cut: this would be cutting the staple, and short staples compromise the tensile strength of the yarn. The amount of fleece you’re chucking at this point is around 5-15%.
Now is the big separation moment, one I think really makes my yarns the best they can be - finding where the pure wool transitions to wool and hair. When the weather is bad, sheeps turn and point their back ends at the wind and rain, and they have evolved to have a thick, rough and matted covering on their back quarters as a result. The hair has a structural purpose, holding the depth of the wool rather than letting it flatten against the skin. It’s the depth of the wool as much as anything else that protects the sheep; the trapped air warms and keeps the rain far away from the body. The area of this is about the covering of the back legs, but it varies with age, breeding and how awful the weather has been. Thankfully, it’s easy to see and feel the difference. So grab, evaluate, tear and discard, anything up to 30% of the total weight of the fleece.
Now there are two piles beside me: ‘yarn’ and ‘other’. Sometimes ‘other’ is the bigger pile, but that’s just the way it goes. What I do have is a weight of wool fleece I can be proud of. I have done right by the sheeps wool and you the customer, and that matters to me. This pile of fleece will go on to make yarns, and hopefully make enough money to keep the farm, the sheepies and me in business for another year.