From Greasy Raw Fleece to Clean, Fluffy Wool

When you reach into a sheep’s fleece, the unmistakeable scent of lanolin rises from the wool as the thick grease coats your hands. Some people love this wooly smell and feel; others wrinkle their noses and can’t wait to wash their hands.

The sheep, of course, do not wash. (A few get spruced up in preparation for a show, but they are the exception.) That lanolin has an important job in helping sheep shed water and protecting their skin. Refined lanolin is helpful to humans, too, in skin care and waterproofing. It is not helpful in passing the fleece smoothly through the machinery that converts wool to yarn. Lanolin and other wool waxes retain the dirt that sheep accumulate throughout the year. Before you cast on your knitting project, you want the wool that you choose to be thoroughly washed. In the wool world, washing is referred to as scouring.

Large North American yarn manufacturers who order yarn by the ton can send their bales of raw wool to one of only two remaining scouring facilities in the United States. If you have less than a thousand pounds of raw wool, you need to find another option. For a farm with just enough wool to make a batch of yarn, between 10 and 50 pounds or so, a spinning mill such as Battenkill Fibers may be willing to scour it for you as part of making yarn. But scouring uses a lot of heat, water, and soap, and all that hot soapy water needs to be processed, too.

The Need for Clean Wool

Battenkill Fibers founder Mary Jeanne Packer tells the story of how everyone at the first meeting of the Hudson Valley Textile Project, a nonprofit founded to strengthen the natural fiber industry in the region, realized that the first thing they needed was a way of producing clean wool. The organization had ambitions of developing a sustainable regional textile supply chain from fiber farm to finished fabric, but if the natural fibers produced in the area couldn’t be scoured, they were stuck.

The organization mulled over all kinds of solutions before deciding to open their own scouring facility that would serve farmers, mills, and anyone else who needed between 50 and 1,000 pounds of raw wool to be opened, washed, rinsed, and dried. They found space in an old building, found new and used equipment, and began washing fleece. They call the program Clean Fleece New York.

Clean Fleece New York facility manager Norah Moses removes a load of clean wool from the KiwiScour machine.

On a cold day in March, I climbed the stairs of an old brick building in Mechanicsville, New York and opened the door into a bright, tropically humid space dominated by three massive machines. Warehouse shelves stacked with bags of greasy wool lined one wall, and racks of clean wool dried under a fan across the room. Clean Fleece Facility Manager Norah Moses took raw wool from a machine that opened the locks and placed it in the KiwiScour, a “scouring train” (series of washing steps that the wool passes through) to extract the dirt and lanolin. After spinning out the water in a top-loading washing machine, she spread out the clean wool on wire shelving.

Cecilia Tkaczyk, owner of CeCe’s Wool and a Jacob sheep farmer, picks up an order of scoured wool from Clean Fleece.

Toward the end of my visit, farmer Cecilia (CeCe) Tkaczyk stopped by to pick up some of her clean Jacob wool. The owner of CeCe’s Wool yarn shop, CeCe also has a pillow factory and makes wool dog beds; she won’t be having this wool milled into yarn, though she uses it in handspinning. Battenkill Fibers and even larger spinning mills use Clean Fleece in their yarn manufacturing.

When you hold a skein of small-batch yarn in your hands, the scouring process may not be the first thing that comes to mind—most of us think about the beauty of the yarn or the lovely thing we’re going to make. But before that skein of yarn reaches you, it needs a thorough washing . . . and that’s where Clean Fleece comes in.

See the wool scouring process at Clean Fleece in Episode 3 of The Yarn Chronicles, streaming now for subscribers to Farm & Fiber Knits.

Links

Clean Fleece
Hudson Valley Textile Project
Battenkill Fibers Carding & Spinning
CeCe’s Wool