Working With Wool: Turning a Raw Fleece Into Yarn

A fleece straight off the shears looks nothing like yarn. It is a greasy, hay-flecked, faintly farmyard-smelling mat, and the first time you handle one it is hard to believe there is a soft skein of wool hiding inside it. But there is, and getting it out is a sequence of calm, unhurried steps rather than a single clever trick. This guide walks the whole path, from the fleece on the shearing board to a finished, settled hank, with the parts that genuinely matter to a UK homesteader flagged along the way.

None of it needs expensive kit to start. A drop spindle, a pair of hand carders and a washing-up tub will take you a surprisingly long way. The real skills are patience and a light touch, and both come with practice.

From fleece to yarn: the whole journey

It helps to see the shape of the process before diving into any one stage. A sheep is usually shorn once a year, and that single fleece then travels through a handful of steps to become yarn.

The stages, start to finish

1. 1

   Shear and skirt

   The fleece comes off in one piece. You lay it out and skirt it, removing the dirty edges, dung, and short second cuts.

2. 2

   Sort and grade

   Different parts of a fleece have different quality. Sort the good, sound wool from the coarser or weaker bits.

3. 3

   Scour or spin in the grease

   Either wash the fleece to remove lanolin and dirt, or spin it with its natural grease still in, depending on the wool and what you want to make.

4. 4

   Tease and prepare

   Open the locks up, then card, comb or flick the fibre into a form you can spin from.

5. 5

   Spin a single

   Draft out the fibre and add twist so it holds together as a single strand, called a single.

6. 6

   Ply

   Twist two or more singles together in the opposite direction to balance the yarn.

7. 7

   Skein and set the twist

   Wind the yarn into a hank, wet it, and let it dry. A yarn is not really finished until it has been wet and allowed to settle.

That last point is worth holding onto. New spinners often think the yarn is done the moment it comes off the wheel or spindle. It is not. It is not finished until it has been wet and settled, and skipping that step is the most common reason a first skein looks over-twisted and lively.

Skirting: sorting the good from the grubby

Skirting is where a raw fleece becomes workable, and it is the least glamorous, most useful thing you can learn. Lay the fleece out flat, cut side down so the tips face up, on a clean table or a sheet on the floor. Then work round the edges removing anything you would not want in your yarn.

• Soiled edges and dung. The belly, leg and tail wool is usually matted with vegetable matter and muck. Pull it off and set it aside.
• Dags. These are the dung-caked lumps around the back end. Dispose of them responsibly rather than spreading them about, since soiled wool can carry animal disease.
• Second cuts. Short snippets where the shearer went over the same spot twice. Left in, they turn into little pills and lumps, called neps, in your yarn.
• Matted or weathered tips. Anything felted or badly sun-bleached at the tip.

Which UK breeds suit spinning

The breed makes a real difference to how easy a fleece is to spin, and to what it is good for. As a rough rule, finer wool is softer but shorter and fiddlier, a longer staple is easier for a beginner, and coarser wool is durable and better suited to outerwear and rugs than to a next-to-skin jumper.

Breed	Character	Good for
Blue-Faced Leicester (BFL)	Fine-ish, long, lustrous staple, beginner-friendly	A forgiving first fleece, soft knits
Shetland	Variable, mostly medium, native UK	General handspinning, colourwork
Jacob	Multi-coloured, variable and a touch coarser, drafts easily	Natural-coloured yarns, easy learning
Cheviot / Corriedale	Medium, springy, hard-wearing	Durable everyday yarn, outerwear
Longwools (Wensleydale, Teeswater, Lincoln)	Long ringlet locks, high lustre	Combing into worsted, lustrous yarn
Merino	Finest and softest, but short and very greasy	Softness, but harder to spin and scour

For most UK homesteaders the realistic starting points are the native and longwool British breeds: Shetland, Blue-Faced Leicester, Jacob, Cheviot and Corriedale. Merino is gorgeously soft and much talked about, but it is short-stapled, high in lanolin and harder to handle, and it is unlikely to be the breed in your own field anyway.

Washing and scouring, and the one rule that saves your fleece

Raw wool carries lanolin, which is the sheep's natural grease, along with suint, which is dried sweat, plus dirt and vegetable matter. You have two broad choices: wash it clean, called scouring, or spin it "in the grease" with the lanolin still in, which lubricates the drafting. Spinning in the grease suits low-lanolin British breeds and is as simple as a cold overnight soak, a rinse and a dry. Scour first if you want clean fibre, plan to dye, or are dealing with fine, greasy wool like Merino. Either way, wash soon after shearing, because grease hardens and gets harder to shift as the fleece ages.

If you do scour, the single most important thing to understand is felting, because felting is what turns a fleece into a solid useless mat, and it is entirely avoidable once you know how it happens.

On temperature, sources genuinely disagree on the exact number, so it is better to work from the principle than to chase a single figure. Lanolin softens and melts at around 35C, so the water must be well above that to lift the grease, which is why handspinners commonly work somewhere between about 50C and 60C for greasy wool, and cooler for low-grease fleeces. One well-known UK guide puts it bluntly: if the water is cool enough to put your hand in comfortably, it is not hot enough. Soak for around 20 to 30 minutes, and crucially do not let the water go cold while the fleece is in it, because as it cools the melted lanolin sets straight back into the wool. Keep the wash and the rinse at the same temperature and you will not get a felting shock.

To dry, get the water out without wringing. A salad spinner, a spin dryer, or simply whirling the fleece in a mesh laundry bag all work. Then lay it flat on netting with air moving around it, away from direct heat, and be patient. A fleece can take a couple of days to dry fully.

Preparing the fibre: carding, combing and flicking

Clean, dry wool still is not ready to spin. The fibres need opening up and arranging, and how you do that decides what kind of yarn you get. The two broad styles are worsted, which is smooth and aligned, and woollen, which is airy and lofty.

• Combing pulls the fibres straight and parallel using a pair of wool combs, aligns them into a preparation called top, and strips out neps and vegetable matter as it goes. It gives a sleek, strong worsted yarn and suits long, lustrous breeds.
• Carding opens and blends the fibres so they lie every which way, producing a light batt or a rolag. It gives a soft, airy woollen yarn, is more forgiving, and blends colours and breeds beautifully. Hand carders are the cheap, sensible starter tool; a drum carder handles larger volumes and blending for a bigger outlay.
• Flicking uses a small flick carder to tease open just the ends of an individual lock. It is quick, good for sampling, and lets you spin straight from the lock.

Spinning, plying and setting the twist

Spinning is nothing more mysterious than adding twist to drafted fibre so it holds together as a strand. The two common tools are the drop spindle, which is cheap, portable and the classic way to learn, and the spinning wheel, which is faster and continuous but a much bigger investment. A top-whorl drop spindle and a bag of prepared fibre is all you need to make your first yarn.

A few concepts make the rest make sense. You start from a leader yarn, a short starter length tied on to get going. Drafting means pulling out roughly a staple length of fibre in the drafting zone so the twist can run into it. Spin clockwise and you put in Z-twist; spin anticlockwise and you put in S-twist. Singles are usually spun with a Z-twist. If it all feels like too much at once, use park-and-draft: let twist build up, park the spindle between your knees, then draft at your leisure before winding on. A short, controlled draw gives a worsted-style yarn; a long, lofty draw gives a woollen one.

Once plied, wind the yarn off into a hank on a niddy-noddy, a simple frame that measures as it winds. Then set the twist: soak the skein in water, gently squeeze out the excess, and hang it to dry. This relaxes and settles the yarn, evens out the twist, and turns a lively, springy strand into a calm, usable one. It is the finishing touch that makes the whole thing look like proper yarn.

Storing fleece and yarn: keeping the moths out

Wool is keratin, and keratin is food for two household pests: clothes moths and carpet beetles. Much of the damage blamed on moths is actually the work of carpet beetle larvae, but the defence is the same for both. The golden rule is to store wool clean, because the larvae are drawn to the oils, dirt and skin flakes in soiled fibre, and cleaning also destroys any eggs already present. This matters doubly for raw, unwashed fleece.

Store wool in clean, sealed conditions: airtight boxes, vacuum bags, or zipped bags and pillowcases kept shut. Cedar and lavender help a little as a deterrent, but sealed exclusion is what really keeps the pests out. If you suspect a fleece or a batt is already harbouring eggs or larvae, you can treat it by deep-freezing at around minus 18C, or by sealing it in a black bag and leaving it in strong sun until it heats to about 50C.

British Wool: the legal bit, and the honest truth about value

There is one genuine rule to know, and one honest reality to weigh up. If you keep sheep, you may have a legal registration duty, and separately, raw wool is worth very little at market, which is precisely the argument for processing your own.

It is worth being clear about what British Wool is, because people often assume it buys your fleece. It does not. British Wool is a producer co-operative that collects, grades and auctions its members' wool, sorting it into roughly 120 grades and selling it in large lots, then returns the proceeds to producers less its running costs. Payment is deferred, and in practice a producer is often paid for one year's clip around the time they deliver the next.