On Saturday, I met up with a friend and we went on a grand fleecy adventure. My boss finally put me in contact with a friend of his who had rescue alpacas and we met up. She had 12 or 13 fleeces, none of spectacularly great quality but okay and some bits that weren’t much good for anything. I paid what I thought was a fair if low price for all of the fleeces and she just threw in the extra bits for fun. It was so many fleeces that it filled the bed of my truck with the cover on. I told her to see if she could pool her fleeces with some of the other alpaca farms in the area and maybe they could give her some advice on shearing and all that.
Then we went to a nearby farm that had Cotswold sheep. I wanted Cotswold fleece because it’s a lovely longwool that I really enjoyed spinning last time I spun it. After some dithering, I finally approached the shepherd and asked if she had any Cotswold fleeces. And she said, oh I’ve got a sheep right there and my husband can do that sheep as the next shearing demo. Okay! So I got the world’s freshest fleece and it is a Cotswold-Dorset cross and springy and beautifully crimpy. I’m still gathering supplies for washing the sheep but I’m getting there. And I got a full Cotswold sheep fleece off another shepherd there who wasn’t planning to do anything with the fleece so I gave her a bit of money too.
I spent yesterday and today working on washing some of the extra bits because I figured it wouldn’t matter if I fucked them up. So far, putting fleece into tub and spraying the bejesus out of it with the hose seems to work pretty well. Well, spray, let soak for 24 hours, dump, spray plus soap for 2 hours, then rinse and soak again with no soap. It’s pretty clean so far, although there are brown bits. It’s white so I can perfect my cleaning methods before moving to the brown or black fleeces. The thing with alpaca is that they are just dirty. So dirty. They love dust baths and just are dirt dirt.
I need to buy some more supplies (hardware cloth to make inner things for tubs so I can lift it out and the water will drain, one of those hanging laundry things, more tubs) and get washing fleeces because there’s a lot of them and I want to get spinning all sorts of things.