Wool

As many of you know, I got given to me a whole lot of raw wool - I mean, just shorn off the sheep, raw wool. It's full of many icky things, things I don't want to mention here. When I agreed to take some of this wool of a woman's hands, I didn't think it was going to be this bad. You live and learn I guess.

I was given the advice to washing it first before I sent it off to a wool processing place to have it made into roving, which I will then spin. But that's another story. So here's a picture of my first batch of wool that I washed.


As you can see, it came out pretty clean - considering. What gets me is that you can still tell where the "scorched" ends were, i.e. the ends that were exposed to the sun. Plus, there is still a lot of "vegetable matter" in it, little bits of straw, grass, twigs, etc. However, I did notice that after I washed it, I tried shaking it and a lot of it has fallen out.

Now all I have to do is wash the other 49 lbs. Ugh!! I'm going to try to get at least 5 lbs. washed to send that away for my first trial run of turning roving into spun yarn!