After you shear a sheep you’ll need to understand how to wash raw wool before it is useful for any use around your homestead. Washing wool is important for a lot of reasons. Freshly shorn wool is quite dirty. Even the cleanest sheep will have some grit and grim in their wool. However washing wool is also necessary due to the presence of lanolin, also known as “grease” which is a natural oil the sheep produces to keep their wool soft, dry, and moisturized.
Explanation of the Washing Process
We need to wash our wool to make it suitable for spinning and other forms of processing. A raw fleece has dirt, vegetation, grease, bacteria, and sometimes even chemicals the sheep has picked up outside. These things need to be washed out for processing, but also for health and safety of our products. While you can spin unwashed wool it is not a pleasant experience and it is much much harder than using wool that has been properly prepared.
How we wash the wool is also just as important as why we wash the wool. If you wash wool incorrectly and agitate it too much you will end up with what is known as a felt, where all the fibers tangle together in a large mass. Felted wool is sometimes desirable, but this process is supposed to occur after the washing as opposed to being a mistake that happens during the process.
In addition to preparing the wool for use in other crafts and good, we can also use the washing process to harvest the lanolin from the wool and use that in homemade soaps and moisturizers. We won’t be covering the lanolin extraction process in this article, as it is much more complicated, but you should be aware that there is more to get out of your sheep than just the wool!
How to Wash Raw Wool, Step by Step
Washing Raw wool is a simple process, and you don’t any fancy gear or equipment to do it!
Prepare The Washing Water
Fill your sink or tub with hot water (at least 140F). Add 1-2 teaspoons of dish soap to water per fleece you intend to wash. Mix the soap into the water before you add the wool, as after you add the wool, you must be careful not to agitate it.
Bag The Wool
Move your raw wool fleece into the mesh bags. While any fine mesh bag will work, delicate bags for laundry machines work very well for this. Try not to over stuff the bags, but you can fill them quite full.
Soak The Wool
Put on your rubber gloves and gently submerge the bagged wool into your hot soapy water. Be careful not to agitate the bags, just ensure they are pushed to the bottom and the wool becomes fully wet. Let the wool soak for around 30 minutes. The water will cool, but it should remain warm during this process. If the water becomes tool cool the lanolin will re-adhere to wool fibers. Just by soaking the wool you will see the water quickly become dirty and take on a darker color.
Drain the Water
Drain off the water while being careful to not agitate the wool. If you are using a sink, simply pulling the stopper will work, but if you are using a tub, you will want gently remove the wet wool from the water and place it aside while you dump out the water.
Repeat The Washing Process Until Clean
After you have drained the water, you will need to prepare another tub of hot soapy water and soak your wool again. Dirtier wool will require more washes, but generally the water will stop discoloring by the third or fourth wash even for the dirtiest fleeces. Each time be sure to keep from agitating the wool too much as that will leave you with a bag of felt instead of clean wool.
Rise the Wool
After the wool has been washed drain and fill the tub again with clean hot water and don’t add any soap. Submerge the wool gently as you had before and repeat the draining and filling of the tub until there are no more bubbles. Depending on the amount of water you use this could take 2-3 rinses. Since we are trying to gently rinse the wool you have to use more clean water each time you do this. Do not scrub the wool!
Drying the Wool
When you have finished rinsing your wool for the last time you will want to very gently press your wool evenly to remove as much excess water as you can. You can do this against the side of your tub or sink or place the mesh bag between to flat surfaces to apply and even light pressing to the wool. Do not wring or twist the wool and don’t over stress it when squeezing out the water.
Take the pressed out drying wool and carefully remove it from the mesh bags and place it on your drying rack. If you wool is not staying together you drape a cloth over the drying rack to offer more support for your wool to dry on.
Drying can take up to several days, but once you are done you will have clean wool ready to process!
Supply:
- Dish Soap
- Hot Water
Tools:
- A Sink or Large Tub
- Mesh Bag(s)
- Rubber Gloves
- A Drying Rack
Materials: Raw Wool
Washing Raw Wool Is Easy
Washing raw wool is an easy and necessary task. As long as you keep in mind that you are trying to avoid making your raw wool into a felt mess, you’ll do just fine. While the washing process can be completed in a few hours, the drying is what takes the longest. After your wool dries it’s ready for processing into yarn or thread or even into actual usable felt. We hope this guide helps you turn the bounty from your sheep into amazing goods for your home.