One Worth Telling - Part I

Recently Mom has had quite a health scare with a heart not working as it should.  In fact I moved in with her just before the pandemic hit to help her with minor things like cooking, cleaning and laundry; I am still here.  Fortunately, she received the surgery she needed at a major university hospital in her state in the midst of the wave that hit hard in April and has made quite the recovery.  At 91 she is able to move around, care more for herself and even learned how to use FaceTime to chat with family members.  She more recently has had cataract surgery and recovered from shingles.  To say the least, 2020 has been very eventful for her.

It has been a gift to be able to spend so much time with Mom.  We have done a great deal of ¨. . .remember when . . .¨ and ¨. . .what was the name of . .. ¨ ?  Although we both read and knit a great deal the last several weeks have been filled with other activities that have lead to this:

Meet Old Wine Cork, approximately 52 yards of yarn in a fingering weight:

This is the point at which we are today.  It has taken Mom and me and a few helpers about two months to get to here.  So let´s bring you up to date.

I have a nephew, who with his wife and five kids have raised three sheep-goats.  They are a cross between a sheep and a goat as the name obviously implies and at times are called shoats or geeps.  In May these three sheep-goats, named Rosy, Daisy and Oreo, were sheared.  Here are before and after shots of Daisy and Oreo.  Rosyś wool seems to have much more hair in it so it may not be used.  With such abundance one can be choosy.

I think the dappled faced one is Oreo and the black faced is Daisy.  Rosy is not shown.  One can imagine they might have been happy to get that thick coat of wool taken off just as the heat and humidity of summer arrived.

I asked them to save a small plastic grocery bag of the wool to test if it could be used to make yarn.  One of my brothers assured me the wool was useless and joked it would really smell when I burnt it.  Well within a few days the family stopped by with all three coats.  It is and was an impressive amount of wool.

The wool caretakers

If you look closely it is clear this is a white wool that has been out in the field and weather for at least a year.  It was dirty, but had an average staple of about 4 inches making it pretty easy to spin.  It´s texture is not fine but it will make a sturdy wool.  There was some lanolin in it but not too much.  A few years ago I spun wool with a lot of lanolin and found it very hard to spin.  It was lucky the family didn´t listen to my request because this wool was going to give me hours of practice in prepping and spinning wool.  Best part, it was all free to me, actually I was going to attempt to make something out of fleece that in the past had been discarded.

Cleaning raw wool was a new experience to me thus making me a real novice in dealing with it.  Did that deter me in anyway from trying to tackle the process, no way; ignorance is such sweet bliss.  My thought was: hey there are Google and YouTube and plenty of time to learn, so I just washed the fleece.

It was warm and I am in a farm house with a basement and a washer and clothesline readily accessible.  (This process would have been impossible at the condo due to lack of appropriate facilities.)  Dawn dish washing liquid was used to remove the dirt but it took three washing/soaking attempts and three rinses to achieve clear water after the process.  The clean wool moved from a light gray to a cream color and was hung on the line to dry.  

About 1/4 of the fleece drying in the breeze

I don´t own combs which might have greatly helped with the removal of vegetable matter (vm), the small pieces of hay and straw as well as the random burdock seed.  But I do have lots of time and a set of Ashford hand carders Mom purchased for me just to work with this fleece.  So I started by sitting outside picking the fleece to remove the vm, releasing it from the wool so it falls away.   It was slow going until Mom decided to pitch in and wow she loves sitting outside looking over the barley planted near the house listening to the birds chirping and picking.  Even the kids pitched in for a while.

The picking crew in physical distancing mode

When one spends approximately an hour or so a day picking and carding wool the small amount of lanolin in the wool softens hands. Mom and I agree our hands have not been this soft since before the pandemic when we were not so diligent about washing them.

Stay turned we have much more to go to get to Old Wine Cork.  Part II will be coming soon.