Information for Hand Spinners

If you are a hand spinner who wants to do everything from washing the raw wool to making fabric, we will sell you some raw fine wool.  However, if you, like us, think that the most fun is the spinning itself, we recommend starting with our scoured fiber or our opened fiber.  Even for a few fleeces, scouring is a difficult process to set up at home, and the finer your fiber, the harder it is to clean properly and the easier it is to damage in washing.  For the intrepid, from our own experience, it is wise for your first washing attempt to wash no more than about a quarter to half pound in the bathroom sink or a washtub.  If you tolerate well the idea of that mess multiplied by the size of a whole fleece, you have the grit it takes to wash your own wool.

Some spinners enjoy having some lanolin left on the fiber after washing because they like the way the fiber feels when they spin it that way.  We have found that on coarser fleeces this works nicely without interfering with your ability to draft the fiber.  However, we can't recommend this for our fine wool or mohair.

Should You Buy Scoured or Opened Wool?

If you have hand cards or a drum carder and want to experiment with those tools, a good option is scoured wool.  The greasy lanolin has been removed, but the wool is still in locks that need to be opened before smooth fiber drafting can occur.  That's where your carding tools come in.  The locks should be manually opened to some degree, especially at the tips, before loading on your hand cards or drum carder.  Also, the finer the fiber, the more fine and dense the wires need be on the carding cloth.

If you want to spin with minimal preparatory effort, the ideal preparation is our opened wool.  Mohair, less crimpy wools, and smooth fiber like alpaca can be drafted from a handful of opened fiber grabbed right out of the bag.  Fine, crimpy wool is harder to draft from a clump in your hand because it is nearly impossible to draft after the twist hits it.  Crimpy wools, like our fine wools, are easily pulled by hand from a mass of opened fiber into a simple roving that is ready to spin like in the picture.  Unless you are making extremely bulky singles yarn, the roving from our carder is too thick to use directly, and you'll likely find yourself making that thinner roving by hand anyway.

Our opened fiber is ready to blend, card, or spin from the bag.  Our fine wools are excellent for blending with some of the slippery, less-crimpy fibers to add elasticity and softness to your yarn.

Things to Remember When Blending Fibers:

• When you spin blended fibers with different characteristics, there is a tendency for the blend to spin more like one of the fibers in the blend than the others.  The controlling fiber may not be the one that makes up the biggest percentage.  It can be the one with the longest staple length.

• Try to match the staple length of the fibers in the blend to the extent possible.  Too large a difference in staple length can make the shorter fibers act like an overdose of second cuts, resulting in pills, uncontrolled slubs, and other unwanted things in the yarn.

• Your yarn will be about as soft as the coarsest, least-soft component fiber.

Our mohair fiber is only offered in the opened form.  Our Arkansas angora goats pack serious vegetable matter in their locks while they eat in the woods.  Our equipment is a far more practical way to knock the veggie particles down to a level we consider acceptable than anything done with hand opening tools.  We know you'll be pleased with the results.

See also "What Makes Soft Yarn?" and "Wash Your Wool Yarn or Sweater Safely"

Our Spinner Quality Fiber is from the heavily skirted saddle wool, the best, cleanest wool the animal grows.

We offer the following fibers on a continuous basis in quantities to satisfy all but the biggest industrial-strength spinners:

• Luxury fine wool

• Fine kid mohair

• Fine yearling mohair

• Adult mohair

 In more limited quantities, when we happen across some exceptional fleeces, you will also find in our store:

• Crossbred wool

• Down breed wool

• Long wool

• Llama wool

• Alpaca

If you don't see what you are looking for in our online store, contact us.