Skirting Icelandic Sheep Fleece

hi i'm katrina from pure joy farms and today i'm going to be showing you how to skirt a sheet fleece [Music] we have icelandic sheep on our farm but this method works for any type of sheep after shearing we put the fleece in a plastic bag we pick it up from the barn floor trying to be careful how we fold it but it's a fast process so a lot of times when it goes into the bag it probably isn't it doesn't go in as well as it could and it stays in the bag until it's i have time to skirt um so today i'm just going to be walking you through the whole process um exactly what i do i've never looked at this fleece since it was sheared and so i'm just going to dump it out and we're going to go for it and see what we find this is from one of our youths darla she is a badger face with icelandic coloring meaning her body is mainly light color her face is dark her feet and legs are dark so you dump it out you're gonna see mostly the cut side hopefully that should be on the bottom when it comes off the animal or when it's laying on the floor and then you're going to want to start to peel this apart okay so you want to be careful how you do this you want to go slower than faster you're trying to separate the cut side the sheared side from the ends of the locks they naturally want to bind together and so you're going to be gently pulling apart the the locks and the cut side so you're going to look for any natural breaks in here to want it to fold open here you can see that right there folds pulls apart and you're just gonna work with it sometimes you can figure it out right away sometimes it's a bit more of a mystery if the fleece gets twisted as it comes off the animal [Music] okay so once you have it all laid out pretty nice and flat um one more little pocket here pull that out you're going to want to determine where the head was and where the the back end was it's usually pretty easy to tell the head is going to be typically kind of matted together right underneath the head right in the neck and the chest area that's because that's where they drink so the water drips there where they eat and so um just hay maybe is cotton there um when they're grazing in the grass that's where the burrs are going to get picked up so that's typically a throwaway area and the wool doesn't grow quite as long in that region anyway um so that is up here on her i can tell that there's a few burrs in there and the wool is a little shorter sometimes it's a little bit finer it's kind of furry looking that is the head and neck you go down to the other end then that's the head then obviously this is the back end you are most likely going to see a little bit longer wool on an icelandic anyway and it's a little bit straighter and a lot of times you'll see maybe some clumps of poo let's see if we can be so lucky to find any and sometimes i take it off right in the barn if it's real obvious i actually don't see any on her which is nice um so now it's just a matter of taking out everything we don't want in the fleece so i'm going to be going around the edges and then working in the middle just by feeling trying to find the burrs as i work around the edge i pull off anything that's short like this and kind of furry looking you want to leave the staple length or the length of the lock to be pretty consistent throughout so when a hand spinner is going to be spinning this they're going to want a consistent length they're not going to want to deal with these little shorties you can save these for your own purposes if they're nice and clean and you have a little craft project or if you want to if you like to just spin um small projects you can save those if you want to too but either way you want to pull it out pull out the stuff that doesn't work for spinning these little fuzzies so i'm just going to work myself around here when you come to a burr um you can do one of two things it kind of depends on the type of wool that you're dealing with but if it you don't want to just grab the bur and pull it out you're going to end up pulling all the locks with it and get kind of a frayed furry look so you're going to want to pull the wool gently away from the burr trying not to open up the burr so that it leaves all its lovely seeds behind when it gets to a point where you can safely release it then you can put your one hand on the lock keep that steady and then use your other hand to pull the bur out it should stay there if you come across a big section of burrs you may want to just pull all of those the locks out together and throw away that that whole section of locks what i mean by lock is i'll take out that white section i had before these are locks so this would be a lock this would be a lock and you can just separate those by holding on to the outside so all those other little fibers stay with those locks [Music] i'm going to flip this up here just so you can see something that i'm looking for so when the shearer is cutting sometimes they end up taking two swipes along and so you end up getting these little what we call second cuts those you want to pull out if you see them anywhere just because when you card and spin those get to be um have a real pain you want everything like i said to be the same length [Music] okay so i think i'm done skirting i can't feel any more lumps underneath my hands and i've got all the the shorts the second cuts out oh two more so now to store your fleece if you're not going to be working with it immediately you want to store it in a way so that you can unroll it and come back to this this layout so what you want to do is you want to fold it lengthwise the locks on the locks i'm just going to kind of grab it fold it up now you get to see that lovely undercoat and you'll probably find some more second cuts under here so go ahead and pull those out oh isn't that pretty it's like a big blanket okay so now we're gonna roll this up like a sleeping bag just going to grab it and get it i want to do it gently but firmly at the same time if that's a thing and just roll it up if you see any other second cuts as you go pull those out it should pretty much stick together and roll up there you go now you have a little little bundle so i put my fleece into these bags i make these out of just a homespun cotton fabric um they do kind of grip the fleece as you as you put it in here but it's a nice way to store them because your fabric can breathe and then whether if you don't work with your fleece for a number of months or even years it can stay in this bag then while you're carting it you can again store it back in the bag so then when you want to work with your fleece you're going to take your bag off very carefully peel it away and you're going to expose it again you're going to dump it out on your table and then slowly unroll your sleeping bag and then open up your flap and that's it thanks for viewing

Channel: Pure Joy Farms

Views: 1,431

Rating: 5 out of 5

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Id: xEiUzqmd7Ys

Length: 12min 19sec (739 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 10 2020