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One Worth Telling - Part II

Before I move forward on the wool processing there needs to be a bit more information about the rabbit hole I went down searching for information regarding the sheep-goats.  Those who spin like to know the breed of sheep the fleece comes from to better spin it.  No one knew much about the breed of sheep so I contacted the local university extension animal husbandry person with the before and after photos from yesterdayś post to see if he could tell me anything.  I am still waiting for an answer but then I might have been asking an impossible question.  Photos are not very helpful when trying to determine a breed, I spent hours looking at images of different breeds with no luck in finding anything that looked like Daisy and Oreo.  Then my nephew shared that the sheep were a St. Croix breed.  (Perhaps I should have started there!)

Note the ewe´s coat

You can find more photos of St. Croix sheep, both the bearded rams and the ewes, on this website.  Finally the long, narrow faced sheep I had been searching to find, but the St. Croix are hair sheep meaning they lose hair and are not sheared nor generate wool.  Now I was confused.  How do we get from one sheep and one goat to the two whose wool I am processing.

There was some searching to find out this info.  Sheep have fewer chromosomes than goats so natural breeding often leads to still-born lambs, but some do survive.  A lab process where the two are combined genetically yields a lower mortality rate.  As I read more about the crossing of the two species I got way out of my realm to understand the science, so I asked my son who is trained in genetics to help me.  Ask this scientist something he is interested in and one can get a lot of useful information.  Here is an example of the type of detail he could offer (thankfully he does a great job of dumbing down that science for me)


So he helped me understand that Daisy and Oreo are more than likely a natural cross between a sheep and goat that did survive and then one or both of their parents or grandparents were again crossed (back crossed) with another sheep, a breed that generates wool rather than hair.  In the end I really do not know much more about the breed of sheep I am spinning the wool from than when I started, but I have learned a few things about genetics.  The wool is usable and that´s about all I need to know.

Picking wool means the staples (threads) are pulled apart to allow vegetable matter to fall out and the fleece is fluffed during the process.   It is a simple task, can be tedious and requires tenacity to do the volume we have but Mom loves it.  Sheś the one nudging me to join her each day the weather permits.

Mom picking


Our picked fleece

As Mom picks the raw wool I hand card it.  Here are some photographic images to help with the explanation.  

Only one of the two carders being cleared


A brown paper bag full of fluffy rolags

A more tightly wound set of rolags

Using two hand carders, one holding the wool and the other pulling it, creates a very fluffy white batt that can be rolled into rolags (small pieces of fleece where the staples are all lined up).  These rolags make for easy spinning.  Look how very white the prepared wool becomes.  Is every piece of vegetable matter removed at this point?  Not quite, the spinning process further pulls the fibers apart and any remaining vm falls away.  Mom does a very good job even with altered vision due to cataract surgery.

The more tightly rolled rolags were an experiment to see if these more dense babies improved spinning.  The results for me with this wool is it did not.  The staples are long and seemed to become tangled so the fluffy rolags are what I am exclusively producing now.

With the carding complete, spinning could begin.  The picture of the picked wool reveals to those in the know some problems that I will talk about in Part III.  It will involve neps and noils.


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