Fleece Remediation & Apple Bark Dye part 2

May is here, and it is weirdly glorious so far! Almost too hot. Or perhaps I’m just not ready for it 🙂

This weekend brought a couple of cool local fiber events- The Skagit Weavers Guild Silent Auction, and the Wonderful Woollies sale. I made sure to hit both.

Was my first time at the Weavers Guild auction. Amazing bargains. Tons and tons of yarn. But I was mostly interested in fleece/fiber. I came away with some beautiful white kid mohair ( 10 oz, $9) and a bag of white washed wool (2-3 lbs? $5) that looks vaguely border leicester-ish. I think that the two will work really nicely together, and will give me lots of material for dyeing experiments this summer.

At the Wonderful Woollies event, the farm hosting the sale was offering up imperfect romeldale fleeces for $5 each. I picked up a smaller (maybe 8 lbs ?) light brown one, because how can you not, right? Whatever is not usable can just go in the compost.

I’m all about imperfect fleece. Matted tips? veg? discoloration? No problem. As long as there is something worthwhile underneath. So for starters, here’s a picture of the underneath

The length of usable fleece varies a bit, but the wool is so fine and crimpy that it doesn’t need to be very long to be spinnable. I was high on wool fumes when I got home, so dove right into sampling.

Here are the steps I’m taking to salvage the good stuff from under it’s cruddy exterior.

First off, I’m wielding scissors. Trimming off as much as necessary to remove all weathered/veg encrusted/dirty bits

like so

the results-

From there, it’s on to washing. There was quite a bit of yellowing, but I figured that it might wash out.

And some of it probably did, but certainly not all.

For this batch, I thought I’d just card it up and see how the yellow affects the overall color. Might look kind of apricot mixed with the taupe-y brown. And might be a really interesting base color for over-dyeing later on.

So now I’m spinning up my little rolags. Fleece feels really nice and springy. I think I did a better job this time of getting all the grease out in the wash. That has been a challenge for me in the past with finewools. Hope to have some yarn samples to share next week.

And speaking of samples- I did a second run on my Apple Bark dyebath just recently. This time I mordanted the yarn with Aluminum Triformate. Starting colors