How to Skirt a Fleece

hi i'm chris with shepard industries and dakota fiber mill and i'm coming to you from the gnome schoolhouse i'm currently in the events center as the mill is not quite complete it will be complete in june so we're looking forward to that and and having all of you come and visit us here maybe attend a retreat stay in one of our guest rooms and just be pampered and treated like royalty anywho so i am making a how to send your fiber into the fiber mill video kind of showing and going through some frequently asked questions that i get asked and one of the main ones is how much debris how much vm vegetation what have you is acceptable in your fiber when you send it to me there's a lot of fiber mills that your fiber needs to be completely skirted or it will be shipped back to you we will not do that the only thing we will not accept is any fiber that has wool moth evidence either past or present and wall moth evidence is um either the eggs i'm the picture that you're looking at shows the the wool moss in their three different forms and it's it's the pupa where it look they look like little maggots little worms and then there is the actual wool moth themselves which is which are about the size i mean of a pencil eraser they're very small they're not your typical miller moth they're very small so you can have those actually in there and or the eggs and the eggs are like grains of sand but they will be in an area that has been eaten so it'll be like a little a little pocket in here and you'll see these little grains of it looks like grains of sand and you can tell that the fiber has actually been chowed down on or you'll find the little cocoons which look like kind of larger grains of rice they're very small and a lot of folks mistake them for chaff itself so that's the picture so you have something to go by in that respect and how not to get the wall moss in your in your fleeces is don't leave them in the barn uncovered and you know just an open bag up in your hey hey mao or whatever it it's best to keep them inside um where you can keep them away from little critters like that but they can still get in even if it's in your house in your basement in your garage what have you i use temple at the mill it is a residual uh pesticide that that is amazing and it's very safe for other animals for catch dogs and the like and i just spur everything down a couple times a year in the mill and in my wool storage areas and that that takes care of them the wool moths themselves are very easy to kill or you can put it in your freezer if you get a skating yarn or something that has them you can freezing them for a few days will work as well or washing them in super hot water okay with that said we'll continue on to the vegetation here now this is um this would be too much it is to your advantage when you send it to dakota fiber mill to to shepherd industries here it's to your advantage that it is well skirted and that you take the time to pull out the armpits um which of course there it's the area underneath the the legs of the sheep and it looks like this if you can hopefully you can see that it's very tarry it because of the rubbing when the animal walks it it's just very tarry and and if it if the tips are black if they're tarry um there's no amount of washing that's going to get that out so that just gets thrown away and otherwise in the neck area and down the back oftentimes it looks like this where the the vegetation is the chaff is so thick in there that you just pull that all out and throw that away because there's that that's just not not processable at all um it's just so thick in there so that will just get thrown away and and often so always look at the neck that's that when we shear we have a skirting table um similar to this one i'm standing in front of and on our youtube channel ewe we do have a tutorial on how to build just a simple pvc screening table which works great very inexpensive and then as we're shearing it just gets thrown up on here and we could quickly skirt away all the edges the armpits the neck and the rest of it goes in a bag and then before we process it so then it looks it looks pretty much like this and you can see that there's there's chaff in it there's a little bit of chaff and a little bit of dirt here and there but but not bad at all and a lot of this this little chaff will fall out in the process in the carting process and the picking process and so on and so forth so that you're not gonna i mean the sheep don't live in your living room so you're not it's it's not going to be completely chaff-free there's going to be a little bit in there and that's just fine um and then again here is a fleece that that was a coated fleece and there literally is nothing in there and this this is an exception um we don't often get them shipped to us that looks this pristine and in a situation like this you know we'll just pull it apart it'll be shoved in the wash bags there's no money monkey picking needed nothing and we just wash it um straight away and then this customer will only have the grease loss which is the grease that is naturally in wool um whereas a customer that sends it in you know that has it has a lot of debris like this we got to do a lot of skirting and a lot of monkey picking and we throw away half the fleece you know we'll do that we're not going to refuse the fleece but it's it's it ends up being a lot of loss on your end on the customer's end and you're paying us per incoming weight so it's your advantage to to do that and then another question i get a lot is should i wash it before i send it in and i do they're also on our youtube channel we do have a how to wash wool tutorial on there and you certainly can wash it before you send it in because in doing so when you have sheep's wool it's at least a 30 grease loss in there so if you wash it first you're um taking that out of the equation you no longer have that grease loss uh if if you're not real confident about whether or not you can get it completely grease fee free what have you don't worry about that because our policy is that we re-wash all incoming fiber period um no matter if we we deem it clean enough that's just our policy is we wash everything so if you want to take the time and wash it absolutely we welcome that and we don't give you a discount per on the incoming weight per pound because we do re-wash it but there again you've already cut your especially with sheep's well you've cut that at least 30 up to 50 percent sometimes lanolin loss with with the heavy the heavy grease fleeces and then as far as alpaca mo hair the other fibers um it's it's basically the same you know if on the alpaca it's the same with the neck um the the barrel of the alpaca is generally what folks process into the yarn and then the neck and the leg fiber they process into roving so they'll send me first which is the is the blanket where the saddle would go on a horse that area of the alpaca and then they'll bag up the neck and the leg and and send that in too and have that done into roving is generally how it's done but if if the customer wants it all thrown together and made into yarn i will certainly do that for them that's that's totally up to them and mo hair is the same mohair if you're it's very susceptible i call it scarf it's it's like a fiber dandruff and it it you uh the angor goats are very susceptible for it for some reason it can be caused by skin irritation skin infections mites you know lots of different things but it does not wash out and it does not cart out and the scarf that would be at the base after you shear the animal you'll go oh you'll see right around and it wraps around at the base of the fiber where it was sheared it wraps around each of the fiber follicles and you can't get it off it's just i mean unless you would take the time to cut literally cut that whole layer off you can't get it off so the best what i recommend folks to do is just to pull out that area throw it away because it's it's it's going to if if you if it goes through the process it's going to be in your finished yarn it'll be in your finished roving roving and it gets all over my carter so i generally um don't like i will i will skirt it out myself and throw it away if it's in there there again that's in mohair i've seen it some in some sheep and also in some alpaca but not quite as common in those two two types of fibers so then what you want to do how to send it to me um if you're in the speedy delivery zone they have they service five states it's s p e d e delivery um it's very that's the most economical way to get it to us here in gnome um whether it's um if you bring it to them to one of the drop-off spots or you pay the six dollars to have them come to your house and pick it up it's very economical otherwise if you're out of one of those states um the post office parcel post works great and put it i don't care what you put it in to get it to me you can put it in a clear bag you can put it in a black bag you can put it in um i know some mills say don't put it in feed bags as long as your feed bag has no feet in it and it's completely empty throw it in the feed bag i i don't care just get it to me and and i'm not fussy on how you do a great way to do that is if you put it put it in a plastic bag that has no holes in it take your vacuum cleaner your shop back and put a nylon over the end of it and suck all that air out and then tape it up real quick so it's all compressed that's not going to harm the fiber and the more compressed you can get that fiber the more you can get it in a box because if you're shipping through the post office don't use bigger than an 18 by 18 by 18 bucks because otherwise you're going to be paying the large box fees that go along with an oversized box so bear that in mind now if you're shipping with speedy delivery they don't they go by strictly by weight so you can use any size box and and it's strictly by the weight but there again you can the more air you can suck out of the bags and some folks even use those vacuum bags that have the little doohickey on it that you hook up your vacuum cleaner to that sucks it out you sure can use that and i will ship those bags back to you i will save them for you after when we're done processing your your fiber yeah and that's um that's basically the the the most frequently asked questions here at dakota fiber melon and again my recommendations were for our milk not for other males in the country this is just for the dakota fiber mill and we look forward to processing your fiber thanks so much for watching god bless you you

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Id: MOq3_alShYg

Length: 12min 43sec (763 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 31 2020