The Corriedale Conundrum Part 3: Three Day Soak

I am blown away… I can’t believe how white and silky the locks are! Wow! The tips are no longer glued together with urine and most bits of VM should comb out easily. I see a cloud- spun boucle yarn in my future!

The dung tags were open and the dung was unattached for the picking- which made me extremely pleased.

Oh, the possibilities!

The Rinse Water; Yuck!

… After scouring, of course. These locks will need scoured. I enjoy spinning in the grease- and I don’t mind flicking bits of VM from my fiber as I soinn- but I don’t enjoy pulling poop out of my yarn as I spin; I have to draw the line somewhere.

After the one night soak, I could see the light at the end of the tunnel but now, I am out of the tunnel!

One observation worth noting, though, is that the fleece and it’s water bath stank horribly. My husband avoided me the entire time I was rinsing and drying as a result… Yes, it was that bad!

I honestly didn’t mind it, though, because I have always loved the small of barn.

I used four- instead of three rinses- as the fleece was that filthy (as was the rinse water in the buckets). I gently removed the fleece and plopped them into filled buckets. I let the fleece soak a while in each rinse bucket prior to removing it.

After the fourth rinse, the water ran clean and so I gently squeezed the fleece and spread it out on screens to dry. It looks like it may rain today, but as I see it- a little rain will only clean it more.

Looking back, I wish that I’d used a mesh bag for the fleece; it would have made things much easier!

I have to say, too, that I love Corriedale. It seems like I could spin a lot of different textured yarns with just one Corriedale fleece- and I love the silky, soft texture of the locks.

I will keep Corriedale on my list of possible sheep to acquire when I am ready to take that next leap… I mean, step.

I am especially in love with the little ringlets- which gave rise to the boucle idea…

I love when a fleece or fiber speaks to me; it almost always has a mind and plan of its own- if only we  just listen. It will never do what it doesn’t want to do but will always cooperate when the spinner is willing to do the same.

Moving on… I am not sure whether or not I will scour all of this fleece. Some of it actually looks nice enough to spin- as is. Yes, it’s greasy- but I love the feel of sheep grease. I also love the smell.

Some bits will need scouring, combing/ flicking, etc.- but that’s OK with me. I will accept ant opportunities afforded to me by a fleece. I welcome these opportunities with open arms, as I learn so much from them. I also get better acquainted with the fleece I plan to spin- which affords me plenty of time to listen to its subtle demands and desires.

As for the suint vat, I removed the bricks and the fleece remained emerged. It was very stinky, though, and my arms (the vat is deep) and hands stunk until I washed them with Dawn soap.

The skin on my hands was nice and soft all day, though- that’s lanolin for you!

After witnessing the results of the 3- day soak, I expect great things from the suint vat- soaked fleece!

Addendum: I checked the temperature of the suint vat, as it has been chilly at night (around 50 degrees F) and hasn’t been warmer than 70 during the day. I am under the impression that the suint (fermentation) method works best at room temperature (70 degrees) and so I am a bit concerned. As with my other (nettle) experiment, the recent dip in temperature is causing some concern. I am hoping that the lower temperatures will mean a longer fermentation time rather than total failure…

Sometimes, one can only hope…

Addendum: the fleece has been drying on a wire rack but has been gently rinsed several times over by rain. Large pieces of VM (mostly hay) were easily removed; however quite a bit of the equine pine is still trapped in the locks. I have since attempted combing, flicking and carding the bits out. Combing did very little, while carding and flicking showed promise- however this method meant compromising on my desire to keep the integrity of the lock structure. It also made a mess of my cards, as the fleece has not yet been scoured.

Moreover, the dung is still very much trapped in the tips of the locks; these locks will have to be cut in order to remove the dung tags- resulting in shorter fibers.

Thus, the fleece is still un- spinnable after the soak- which was what I expected.

I have since attempted to scour the fleece twice using water (from the tap), Dawn dish soap and Borax. After scouring, I was able to easily flick 99% of the debris from the locks; however, much of the lanolin remained.

I flicked and then spun up some yarn and found that, due to the (still) high lanolin content, drafting smoothly was extremely difficult. Also, the greasy fiber picked up every minute bit of filth from my hands, table, and flicker. In the end, the yarn was a dingy grayish- blue color- not lovely at all.

While I could continue to spin up the resulting fleece and then scour it, chances are, it would be harder to remove the grease from spun yarn- thus making dyeing impossible (dye won’t adhere well to greasy fibers).

Conclusion: After a 3- day soak with Dawn dish soap and two scours, the fleece is still too greasy for my liking. I am wondering if, perhaps, my tap water isn’t hot enough to effectively remove the grease. Also, being that my water is hard, I am thinking that the mineral content may be having an effect on stripping the grease from the fleece.

Tug Bunny Nettle Success!

Day 5: August 26

The temperature has been lower than I’d like and so I decided to make note of the water bath temperature (62.2*): a bit too low for my taste.

However, the retting seems to be coming along- despite the low temperature. My hope is that the retting process will simply take a longer time, rather than have the process not happen at all. Sometimes certain “good” microbes (ie. the microbes I want) only flourish at certain temperatures (and conditions) and have a harder time living (well) in others. Sometimes this allows for the bad guys (ie. the microbes I don’t want) to gain control of things. I hope that this doesn’t happen.

I derive comfort from the fact that flax is often grown and retted in conditions as cool- or cooler- than those currently being experienced in my area.

The water really doesn’t smell bad… I have heard horror stories about the smell of retting but, so far, I haven’t had an issue with the smell.

I have been thinking for some time about method of gathering and processing and which might be better- with the use of better used subjectively- as better is always dependent on situation and personal beliefs and desires.

In Yarn From Nettles- A Practical Guide, Birta Ford lists several ways to process nettles. Her favorite method, though (root retting) seems to yield smallish fibers that are carded and spun using short draw on a wheel (or with a lightweight, supported spindle). Using Ford’s method, it seems like the finished fiber is more like tow than line… I wonder if the resulting yarn is softer like that spun from tow?

NettleJen expressed a bit of frustration with the fact that her (still) water retting experiment yielded short fibers. She maintained that, while they were certainly spinnable, they were a bit short.

I have always thought that the longer the bast fiber (as in flax line), the stronger the yarn and yarn spun from tow- although softer- was not nearly as strong.

August 30

The nettles were removed and put on a rock pathway (as suggested by Ford) to dry. They were turned once during the drying process.

Once dry enough to stand up without bending or breaking, they were leaned up against a structure to dry. Because of an impending storm, they were brought inside to dry fully.

A few days later, we attempted to prep the stalks in order to release the fiber; however, we found that the nettles were not retted enough.

I can only guess that temperature played a role in the lack of retting, as it had been in the low 50s (F) at night and only around 70F during the day- meaning that the average daily temperature was only around 60F.

The stalks were- once again- submerged for 8 days- after which it was clear that the retting process had been successful.

The stalks were dried as before.

Processing

I have read conflicting information regarding the processing of nettles for use as fiber. I have read that, at some point, in some cultures, nettles were prepared/ processed like flax- using scutchers, hackles, etc. I have also read that nettles were processed using completely different methods.

After processing nettles myself, I believe the latter is more realistic than the former.

The spinnable product that results after processing has an incredibly short staple length and, moreovoer, the raw fibers lack the tensile strength of flax. The resulting fibers are more fuzzy and with a staple length of about 1.5- 2”.

It was, at first, necessary to remove the pith from the fibers. This was done by simply breaking the pith away from the bast fibers and then using a fingernail to scrape the spinnable fibers from the remaining pith.

Next time, I will wrap the stalks in a towel and use a rubber mallet to break apart the stalk a bit before further separating pith from fiber.

Birte Ford uses a kind of improvised scutcher but, since we lack this kind of device, we must figure out how to more effectively remove pith chaff from spinnable, solt fibers. I will look into making an improvised scutcher so that we may have one available for processing our root- retted stalks in the spring.

In any case, after liberating most of the spinning fibers from the pith, I attempted to use my drum carder in the pursuit of better carding out pith from fiber. I also wanted to see if I could come up with a spinable fiber by using the drum carder- as Birte Ford suggests.

I found that the soft, thin fibers just got embedded in the tines of the drum- but it did effectively help with further separation of fiber from pith. I believe that- had I had more fiber- the drum carder would have worked well. However, because I was just carding a small sample, the drum carder proved ineffective.

Instead, I used coarse hand cards and was able to separate almost all of the remaining chaff from the fiber. I carded for quite some time, though- until I saw that most of the chaff had been released and that the fibers were looking smooth and spinnable. At this point, I switched to universal hand cards just to smooth out the fibers a bit more.

Fiber Preparation for Spinning

Once the fibers were carded to the point at which my brain deemed them ready to spin, I rolled the fiber into a puni.

The short staple length and lack of a good amount of fiber dictated that the fiber be put into puni form. I suppose I could have spun off the cards but I like to keep things as simple as possible when I am testing a new fiber or spinning method. Also, I really like to know the nature (spin- wise) of a fiber before I spin it from cards; I find that really knowing the qualities of my fiber gives me the knowledge and confidence to spin it from cards with confidence.

The puni form worked well. Very well, in fact. I was surprised how easy the fiber was to spin. I expected at least one break due to over- or under- twisting- but it all went rather smoothly.

Spinning

I began using high twist (6:1) pulley and medium take- up. I found that the initial tension was too high and so I lowered it a bit. I also found that the small pulley was giving me too much twist and so I switched to a larger one (8:1) . It was really a lot of fun to spin!

I used my Lendrum Original DT; you may find that these ratios don’t work for you on your wheel of choice.

By the time I had the tension and take- up figured out, I had run out of fiber :-( .

The resulting yarn was stronger than I thought it would be- and it was extremely soft and fluffy. While linen takes a quite a few washes to soften up, the nettle yarn was instantly soft.

I should mention that the final yarn is a lovely light brown/ mint green color; lovely!

The good news is that I have more stalks to process- which means more experimentation- which means more fun!

Next time, I will use a mallet (as was discussed) to initially break up the stalks.

Also, I am going to be harvesting more nettle to day for dew- retting, as there is now plenty of dew on the ground in the morning.

References:

Yarn From Wild Nettles: a Practical Guide, Ford, Birte. Nettlecraft, Tulliemet, Perthshire, UK; 2014

NettleJen, YouTube