More sulking, fermented fleece, one finished object!

In our last episode, our intrepid heroine was recovering from a bad cold.   Not!

Cold turned into sinus infection and bronchitis.  Toughed it out at work for three days, succumbed and stayed home on Friday.  Started antibiotics and hoped that I would feel better by Saturday, but NO!  I had to miss my spinning guild's field trip to an alpaca farm and fiber processing mill.  Major disgruntlement.

Between naps, I finished the apricot colored scarf on the rigid heddle loom.  Not knowing for sure the fiber content, I cautiously wet-finished it Saturday night.  It looked like the fibers were blooming and I was going to lose the lacy effect of the loose weave I had done, but the bloom pretty much disappeared as the scarf dried.

I was slightly disappointed, though, with the finished product.  The fibers I had used were pretty soft and I thought the scarf would drape nicely.  After drying, the scarf was very, very stiff.  I'm not sure what caused this -- I rinsed it thoroughly, and the weave structure is fairly loose so...    Will revisit this some other time.  Also debating about the length of the fringe.

I finally tackled the Dorset fleece I had soaking in tubs in the back yard.   But so far it has not turned out well.

Two weekends ago, I put one of my purchased fleeces in two tubs of water, intending to give them an overnight soak.   The next day, the water in both tubs was absolutely filthy, so I drained and refilled the tubs, figuring that another soaking would help reduce the amount of yuck that ended up in my sink.   Then I figured another day or two of soaking wouldn't hurt a thing and planned on processing the fleece over the next weekend.  Then I came down with the plague and didn't care much one way or another about the fleece.

When I finally started feeling human again yesterday, I decided to see about finishing the cleaning process.  Here's what I saw when I opened the first tub.

 

And a close-up:

Looks like there is a layer of scum floating on top of the water here -- but it's actually a huge blob of slimy goo suspended in the water.  Have you ever had a bottle of vinegar that wasn't completely pasteurized develop a "mother?"  It reminded me very much of one of these:

Yuck.  I couldn't get it out of the water.  In hindsight, I should have been patient and used a strainer on it, but I'm not sure even that would have worked.  So when I gave up and lifted the fiber out of the water, the yuck seemed to follow the fiber and clung all over it. 

Other aspect of this was the odor.  Strike that word.  The STINK!  Now I have had a very poor sense of smell since childhood.  Added to that, with my clogged sinuses, I wasn't smelling very much of anything.  But the stink that emanated from this brew was incredible.  So much ammonia that it was like walking into a 1960's beauty parlor times 10.  I'm surprised the neighbors didn't call the authorities on me.  Picture a few dozen hazmat-clad, gun-wielding g-men descending on my back yard.

I've been reading up on different methods of cleaning fleece, and it sounds like I stumbled onto the "fermented suint" method.  Basically, you put a very greasy fleece in a tub of rain water (theoretically more free from mineral content than most other water sources) and let it sit for days until it ferments.  The chemical reactions between the water and the suint (sheep sweat) combine to loosen the lanolin (sheep oil) from the fleece, which becomes some kind of soapy concoction that you then use to soak future fleeces for a day or two.  Theoretically it is a "greener" process because it requires far less water to clean a fleece.

Perhaps if I had not used garden tap water, I might have accidentally had a better result.  But here in my part of  SoCal, we very seldom have enough rain water to do more than water the lawn a bit, so I've never looked into collecting rain water.  And now that I know how bad a fermenting fleece smells, I don't think this cleaning method will motivate me.

So I set the fleece on a big screen to dry in the sun.  Not pretty.  The yuck from the water dried to a rusty pink film that I could not separate from the fleece.  And the smell is pretty bad.  So bad, the hundreds of birds that live in my back yard haven't gone anywhere near it.  Come to think of it, I haven't even seen a bird since I opened up the tubs.

Figured that this fleece is probably a total loss, so might as well experiment on it.   I put some into a couple of lingerie bags, and soaked in hot water -- one with Unicorn Power Scour and one with Dawn.  Neither one dissolved the pink yuck, but I think the Unicorn may have pulled a bit more dirt out of the fleece. 

Let the two bags dry overnight.  The good news is that once dry, the smell seemed to disappear.

You can see that the fleece is now a lot whiter, but it's covered by these little pinkish specks.  Still not pretty.  So I put some of it through my Kaydessa Lil' Dynamo wool picker.  It took several passes and a time out to let some fibers that were still a bit damp dry thoroughly, but the pink stuff is flaking off.  In fact, here's what the bottom of the picker looks like after putting just an ounce of fiber through two times.

The inside of the picker was immaculate before I started picking.  All those specks that look like sawdust are actually flakes of the yuck that came off the wool. 

And after two passes through the picker, the wool looks like this:

Still some pink stuff in there but much cleaner and whiter.   I tried washing some of the picked fiber again yesterday to see if it would come any cleaner.  Just waiting for it to dry thoroughly before making any decisions about proceeding.  

They say that Dorset fleece can take some abuse without felting.  Guess I'm going to find out just how much it can take.  I doesn't seem to be that difficult to pick.  We'll see how it cards and then spins.  If it's ok, I may just experiment with some dyes to cover up whatever stains are left behind.  Or maybe the whole lot will just go to the giant compost heap in the sky.