I never got it to work last year
I think there were a number of reasons. Firstly,
and no
- it needs to be warm for the vat to start to work. Secondly, and probably more important (since I tried the airing cupboard with a bucketful and that wasn't very successful either), the initial priming fleece needs to be a greasy one. I thought a fleece which span nicely in the grease was, by definition, greasy, but apparently not. A merino or similar would be good; I don't have anything like that. Some people say primitives are good - but Shetlands have very little grease.
I may see if I can pick up a really good greasy fleece at Woolfest next week and have another crack at it this year. Although the initial fleece is supposed to be dirty as well as greasy... and there shouldn't be anything dirty in the fleece sale at Woolfest...
The theory is that the initial soak with the dirty greasy fleece in a warm temperature creates a soap out of the suint (sweat), grease and dirt, and this soap cleans the initial and subsequent fleeces. It doesn't remove all the grease, so you can still spin in the grease - just clean grease!
-, dye using a stove-top rainbow dye process, whatever, or you can wash it with your regular fleece-washing soap (Ecover is good) but you won't need to use nearly as much soap as you would if you didn't do the suint vat first.
Having failed to get a suint vat running last year, I have since been experimenting with using a cold water soak first, and have found that a lot of fleece comes pretty clean just with that. Your Gotland has come up just lovely, Pedwardine
; I'm going to spin it in the grease during the Tour de Fleece next month.
You need a bit of slipperiness to draft the fibres anyway, so if you wash all that out with soap you just have to add some oiliness back in when you come to comb or spin. However, some fleece is more dirty and really does need soap to achieve a state in which it is nice to spin. For these, I would prefer to use the suint vat as again, it does not remove all the grease, only mostly the dirt, so you get a clean fleece that still drafts nicely.
Another benefit of the suint vat is that fleece is unlikely to felt in the vat, whereas some fibres felt all too easily when getting washed in hot soapy water. Even more so when there's a lot of hay, straw etc in the fibre - the stems seem to provide the friction you'd use a bamboo mat, or bubble wrap to do if you were felting intentionally. (Ask me how I know
)
Last year I also experimented with washing before spinning versus spinning completely raw and washing the plied yarn - and I couldn't tell the difference in the final yarns. Since our own commercial fleece spins just beautifully in the grease, and I'm not very good at carding, that's how I mostly spin our own fleece. However it also combs beautifully too, so now I have English combs I will comb some before spinning this year too. I want to experiment with making woollen yarn from the combed waste, that and felt.
Sorry, I am off on one, aren't I?
Topic: Spinning own fleece (Read 7055 times)
