Wooly Stories

The flippin' camera decided that the pictures it takes are going to come out looking like what the world looks like to me with out glasses and contacts. So no pictures of knit projects, but I don't really want to talk about those right now anyway. I want to talk about the wool I had gotten a few weeks ago that I finally decided to start to do something with. It came from a coworker of my Mom's and it came, very dirty a smelly, and very intimidating to someone that wants to attempt to tackle it with out any experience cleaning raw wool.

I gave some to Kathy, a friend of my mine, the other day and she took it home and her husband and her cleaned it right away, and told me about her process and how excited she was about it. Bite the bullet Ariel, just get started on little bit. That was what her excitement told me. So I began by picking out all of the large debree, then I gave it a little bath with very mild, vegetable based detergent and very hot water. My friend used a different cleaning technique and I found it very interesting that there are so many different ways, her way said no hot water at all, where I found advice to use hot water. It soaked for a while then I rinsed and did another bath with a little less soap, and the water was not as hot, because the wool had cooled down some, and I didn't want to felt it. At the point of the bath the wool went from looking like it was covered in cocoa powder to a beautiful creamy white. As it was drying on a couple of towels on my dining room table I picked through to get even more little pieces out and began to notice varying softness of the wool. There was a lot of coarse wool, but occasionally I would run across a nice little soft tuft of it. Remember, that I have no idea what I am doing as far as it comes to cleaning wool, so I don't even know if that was the correct way or not, I do know that it got the job done.

As soon as I got home from work yesterday I decided I try my hand at dyeing it, using natural dyes from the backyard. Marley and I went out and picked mulberries, dandelions, wild strawberries, dark purple Japanese irises, and rose petals. I put the stuff in some pots and began to cook and see what happened. This is where things got interesting... the strawberries and mulberries were together in a pot that the water turned a rich wine color, the rose petals and the dandelions went in another pot that turned yellowy brown (like a tea color), and the irises, which were again dark purple and were just the flower with a tiny bit of the green part that they blossom out of, these guys turned kelly green. Kelly green!!! Now all of this was an experiment, so I had no expectations, and it was more about letting Marley play around with the wool and the dyes. So those cooked for about 45 minutes. Then it came time to add a mordant. I had researcher this a little bit and found that while alum seems to be one of the better mordants, I didn't want to go to the store to buy any. Vinegar seemed to get the job done on most dyes, but wait I didn't have white vinegar, I only had red wine vinegar. What did I do? Of course I just used that, remember I didn't want to go to the store, and this was also an experiment. The berry dye stayed the same with the vinegar, the rose/dandelion dye stayed the same, but the iris dye went clear as soon as I added the vinegar. The green was a rich, bright kelly green and it seemed like the just erased it.

So we decided to then try to dye the wool. Wool went into a pot, I poured the dyes on top, and started to cook it. Well, nothing happened, no dye on wool. When I pulled the wool out the dye stayed in the pot, and it cooked for about 30 minutes. Ugh. Like I said before, experiment.

After the wool dried I did spin the little bit that tested tonight. I noticed even more the spots of coarse wool compared to the softer spots and just went ahead and spun it all together. It wasn't carded, and I didn't take much time to prep it otherwise for spinning so it is a little rough around the edges but came out beautiful. This is where I need that camera. But I did ply it which seemed to hide some of the flaws. But really is it flawed? I find it fascinating that the only other thing I could have done was sheer the sheep. It kind of gave me a boost of confidence in the wool. Because of the immense amount of lanolin in it I think the first thing I do with it will be soakers.