Local & Bespoke

Any time I feel like I could bear to wash fleece, is the right time to be washing fleece. I don’t love it the way I love spinning, but I’m prepared to do it so I can spin local fleece. And, I have a lot of fleece right now and have turned more down. Several times! The capacity to wash fleece came upon me, so I made a start.

I am washing a fleece that is Polwarth or perhaps a Polwarth cross. Polwarth is a fine wool, but this sheep mows a lawn, it isn’t a prize stud animal with breeding for fineness–so maybe not the finest Polwarth ever. Polwarth is a big breed. This photo shows the garbage bag the fleece came in, packed quite full. That’s after skirting (removal of the really yucky and really short bits at the point of shearing). In the picture I am 2 kg in, with 1.75 kg of raw fleece still to go. I am washing it 250g at a time. So that is many rounds of soak, wash 1, wash 2, rinse. Big job.

This is lovely fleece–soft, a beautiful colour, and with some very dark sections and some where the sheep’s age is starting to show in some greying. Also, fine fleece is the greasiest and the easiest to felt (that means it is hardest to wash well) and I much prefer washing coarser fleece. However coarse fleece makes itchy hats… so off we go!

Now washing raw fleece is a subject on which much has been written. I have drawn the conclusion that there are many ways to arrive at a cleaner fleece, and that different people have the capacity to manage different methods. It isn’t always obvious why. Most spinners have found a way, even if most of us have felted at least one fleece on the path! Anyway, here’s a small list of my personal suggestions.

Care for your back. Plan for safe lifting and carrying of things like containers full of hot water. Do not do anything in your own home that your union would criticise your boss for making you do. In my case, I carry water in containers with a handle (a bucket, not a dye pot). I lift with care: engage the belly muscles and bend the knees, lift with your big muscle groups and not your back. Consider the carrying involved and plan for safety and comfort.

Care for your plumbing. Is it up to this? Is anything going to stop short cuts and entire locks washing into the drain?

Expect things to get messy and wet. Set up your work station accordingly. I use gloves, apron, the lot. I always have a couple of the dyeing towels at the ready, one on the floor soaking up spills and one just in case. I like to use colanders or sieves that fit my buckets/dye pots so that I can rest wet fleece in them and squeeze it firmly–I gather everything before I start. In my case, I need an electric jug to raise the water to the right temperature. The hot tap won’t do it. I use scales to weigh my fleece and cleanser. I always have a container for bits I want to remove. Short cuts, seeds, pine cone parts, dead bugs, locks I have pulled out of the drain. I like to remove all barriers to removing anything I don’t want, immediately.

Consider your cleanser. I’ve heard of people using just about everything to clean fleece, from grease removing products used in the car industry, to dishwashing detergent, soap, fleece specific products, soapnuts, and fermentation. I’d like to use something clean and green but the green claims of a lot of products are hard to adequately assess, some of them travel long distances to get to me, and others don’t seem to work very well. I’ve been right up to “I will never do this again” at times, too, and I’ve found choice of cleanser can make a big difference to how difficult it is to get fleece clean and how good the outcome is.

Have a water saving strategy. Saving water and saving energy go together when you’re using hot water. I try to save water by soaking the fleece overnight in cold water before I start. I lift the fleece out, squeeze it to get as much water out as possible (then squeeze some more–wool is super absorbent), and move to the hot water wash. The soak water is full of nutrients so I use it as a fertiliser on the garden. I wash two batches at once. The final hot rinse for the first batch becomes the first hot wash for the second batch. I am on a roll at the moment, so I put tomorrow’s fleece to soak in the rinse water of today’s.

Yesterday I soaked two batches in the final hot rinse water of yesterday’s fleece washing, and two batches in cold water. This morning I was greeted with two very different sights. The batch that had soaked in cold water still looked like wet wool. The batch soaked in hot water allowed to go cold had a layer of grease on top. This is what is happening as your water cools down. Don’t leave it too long!

Have an entertainment strategy. I have about 15 minutes between hot washes and rinses, and it goes so much better if I have something pleasurable but interruptible to do. This time, I’ve been watching 12 minute videos from the Woodlanders series when the internet allows. It is beautiful. It is wonderful. It is inspiring. Basketry, charcoal, mushroom growing, forest care, nut growing and more! It shows several different Indigenous traditions. It includes woodland cultures and traditions from several different countries and continents. Also, crowd funded, so if you love this series all about forests and those who live and work in them–feel free to chip in, if you can.

Accept feedback. The wool itself will tell you whether what you did worked. In time as you come to spin you will find it felted or you won’t. You’ll find it clean or still too dirty for your taste. You’ll find it a bit sticky from retained greases, or you won’t. Then it’s on you to work out why. I think a lot of us have the concept that wool+ heat+alkalinity+agitation=felt. The wool, the heat and the alkalinity are unavoidable. Agitation is harder. You have to look for your blind spots. Examples include: running water into a vessel that contains wool. Pouring the whole load of water and wool into a draining sieve or similar (water running through wool=agitation). Then there’s good old fashioned playing with the wool while it soaks. I don’t. Submerge it, hold it down, if necessary squeeze and release once or twice to reduce trapped air, walk away.

Greetings, dear readers. Let me be clear right from the get-go, that there are very reliable sources of medical information about the current covid 19 virus, and I am not one of them. Also, that the situations people are facing right now vary widely depending on who you are, where you are, what resources you have… and so much more. Your mileage may vary, and all that.

But… I keep thinking, in this current situation, about what it was like to be a young non-heterosexual as the HIV virus spread around the world, and the things I learned then, that inform me now. So just in case this turns out to be helpful for others, here are some key things I learned in the period before HIV was called HIV. When we did not understand how it spread, we did not know how to dependably protect ourselves, there was no treatment–and people we knew, people like us, began to die.

1. viruses don’t care who you are or how you feel. Viruses travel just as happily between friends or lovers as between enemies. That sweet belief my parents express that I represent no risk to them because I share their DNA? Not a thing. The idea that this is a Chinese virus? Viruses have no nationality, they stalk the earth self-replicating, and that’s it. The appalling racism of white Australians like myself to people of Asian appearance, or folk who run Chinese (Japanese, Korean… who’s paying close attention?) restaurants for a living? Just as rubbish, just as cruel, as racism in any other time or setting. Nothing logical going on there anytime.
2. viruses only care what you do. You either do things that make it easier for them to travel or you don’t. It isn’t a moral judgment, it’s a blunt fact. You can be sharing a virus without knowing you have it. You will pass it on unless you act appropriately–by which I mean, you act as if you have it already, and ask yourself if you would act this way if you knew for sure you had it.
3. prejudice gets in the way of better outcomes for everyone. While HIV was seen as “a gay disease” (in the more developed world), there were plenty of places that treated everyone thought to be “gay” badly, whether they had HIV or not. But treating gay people (and sex workers, and injecting drug users) as expendable, where that happened, just meant the virus got to travel further, faster. People who needed to be tested were too scared to get tested because they had to face this prejudice. When it reached Africa and Asia, this misinformation and prejudice took new forms but continued to create similar problems for humans and opportunities for the virus to replicate and spread.
4. being scared won’t protect you. Being informed and deciding how to act, plus sticking to it all the time–those things protect you. Being too scared to think just gets in your way and puts you at risk of irrational behaviour that places you and others at risk. Accepting someone else’s preparedness to do risky things because you’re not prepared to stand up and say what you think makes sense, places you both at risk.
5. new skills can help you. I came from a conservative family. HIV meant that I had to acquire new skills. How to talk about sex, in some detail, in advance, more openly and frankly. How to negotiate about risk and protection. The people I learned from were people who had better skills about that than I did, including sex workers and BDSM practitioners. I was just a timid teenager, but the generosity of people who did all they could to help us keep one another safe helped me decide to learn. This time round I’m helping people problem solve their way into teleconferencing!!
6. Context is important, and so is gratitude. I remember listening to a woman with HIV talk about how much easier she thought it was for someone more or less like me to deal with negotiating HIV protection, than it had been for her to tell her regular partner that she’d cheated, and now there were sexually transmitted infections to deal with. Fair call. In general, the suffering of this earth is very unequally distributed. Those who already are vulnerable, are likely to suffer so much more than lucky folk like me with a home, savings and food, living in a country with relatively affordable health care. Right now people in India are dealing with this as floods destroy homes and livelihoods. Right now the risk to First Nations people in my country is so much bigger than to white folk like me. Right now I have friends who have lost their incomes and others who may well die if infected because they are already so unwell. Right now people are dying in Africa with nothing like the health care of Europe or Australia. So the ethical thing for me to do is appreciate that this isn’t all about me and the risks I face. It’s about the risks other people face and how I can be part of lessening the risk to them.
7. we need one another. We need support from one another. We need to pull together. We need practical mutual aid. The [other] challenges we face, including the climate crisis, have not gone away. To address the covid crisis we need to build stronger relationships, even if at physical distance. And for the future of all life on earth, we will need those relationships and more. So let’s not allow this whole physical distancing in order to protect one another and make sure health systems are available for those who really need them, get in the way of building relationships.