Wool Tips

1. Wool is a durable fiber - providing long comfortable wear without fraying, holds dyes well and resists fading. Wool garments will outlast synthetic garments without losing their beauty.

2. Wool has natural resilience/elasticity - resisting wrinkles and returning to its original shape time after time, even when wet

3. Wool is an absorbent fiber - absorbing up to 30% of it weight in moisture without losing any of its insulating value. This makes it ideal for mittens, socks, hats and outerwear.

4. Wool is a natural insulator - fabric made of wool can be either warming or cooling as required.

5. Wool is naturally flame resistant - it will not melt under fire like synthetic fiber and does not support combustion making it a safe fabric for home and clothing

Spinning Wool

Wool is the easiest of all the natural animal fibers. Because of its crimp, it just wants to wrap together; but success with wool depends greatly on the way it is processed before you begin to spin.

Flickers, flick-carders, or pet grooming tools are often used on a fleece that has intact locks (either long or short stapled). Flick one end, then turn the lock in your hand and flick the other end. Spin from either the cut end or the tip end OR if the staple length is very long (>5-6 inches) you can fold the lock over your finger and try spinning from the fold (sometimes easier to manage long locks that way). Flicking is a good way to clean wool that has short or weak fibers, bits of chaff or hay. It does not blend a fleece however, and since most fleeces are varigated in color, you will end up with a varigated yarn. This is very attractive, but if you want a large quantity of homogenous colored yarn, then flicking would not be the preparation of choice.

Pickers can quickly open and loosen large quantities of wool in far less time than by any other means. Lots of dirt will fall out of the fleece in the process. You can spin directly from picked if you want a textured yarn, and this is a good way of initially blending two different fibers together (like mohair and wool) prior to carding . However, it can damage weak or very fine fleeces by tearing and breaking the hairs, creating irregular lengths.

Handcards work best on wool of shorter staple length (<3-4 inches) and are wonderful for experimenting with blends or creating small amounts of carded wool for spinning. If you have large quantities of wool to card, you will probably want to use a drum carder.

The drum carder can produce a larger batt which can be used for spinning or felting and can card wool as short as 1 inch and as long as 8 inches (depending on the size of your drum). Both handcards and drum carders come with different sizes of carding cloth. The cloth with more teeth per square inch are better for finer wools and the cloth with less teeth per square inch are better for coarser wools. There is a medium grade of cloth which will cover a wide range of fiber types, but cannot be the perfect cloth for all fiber types. If you wish to card both coarse and fine wools, you may need to have different carders for each. [Some drum carders come with exchangeable drums]. Carding tends to blend colors and fibers together into a harmonious and homogenous combination, but if the wool has much dirt or vegetable matter in it , it will distribute this chaff evenly throughout your batt as well. Flicking the wool before carding will take care of this problem.

Wool Combs comb in a variety of styles and are in general rather expensive tools. They can prepare wool as short as 2 inches, but are best when used with locks 4 inches in length or greater. Combing removes hay and short fibers, leaving you with an extremely uniform and clean fiber. Blending variations within the fleece can be accomplished by repeated combing, splitting and re-combing, but it is not a good way to combine fibers of different staple lengths.. After combing, the preparation is pulled through a diz (an object with a small hole in it) to create "top", which is a superior form of roving.