Custom Fiber Processing

We get a lot of questions as to how to prepare your fiber to be processed. The objective, in our eyes, is to give us the cleanest fleece that you are able to provide. The cleaner the fleece, the more magnificient your yarn will be.

First and foremost, if you bed your animals on woodchips, do not send us the fleece unless you pick all of the chips out! The chips wreak havoc on our carding cloth and will be present in your yarn. Please switch to hay or other fleece friendly bedding.

Please make sure your fiber does not have moths. This is very important to us, especially during the warm months, as we do not want an infestation at our mill. A tell tale sign are the cocoons from hatchings. They look like split open rice grains. If you have these, the moths are there, too. Please contact us as to what to do if you have bugs in your fiber!

If you have a meat breed sheep whose fleece you would like to turn into yarn, please tell the shearer before he gets started. Usually they aren't too concerned with the fleece and will not take care to keep the second cuts to a minimum.

I found this image describing skirting on the internet about 2 years ago and cannot find the site again to give due credit.


This image shows that skirting the fleece is really doing just that; removing the "skirt" around the outside of the fleece after its sheared. This applies to any animal that gets sheared. Although with alpacas and llamas, the blanket is what this picture refers to. There are "2nds" which are neck and higher quality leg wool. "3rds" are the lowest quality wool on the lower legs, which we are unable to process, unless blended with wool.

Once the fleece is sheared, there are now two sides of the fleece. Both sides need to be inspected to achieve the best roving or yarn. The outside of the fleece needs to be picked over to remove any remaining manure, vegetable matter, sticks, and in one case, a few nails. Bad urine staining should be removed also. If you cannot pull the locks apart with your fingers, the machines cannot either, and those sections need to be removed as well.
The skin side needs to be inspected for second cuts. These are places where the shearer has cut too high and had to go back and clip closer to the skin. The second cuts look like little cotton balls floating on top of the locks.

The best place to skirt your fleeces is on a skirting table. We made one using plastic vegetable garden fencing stretched over a wooden frame. You can get galvanized potting tables that are a bit more sturdy from gardener's supply mailorder. But you can also do this on your swept driveway. The tables are great though as a lot of dirt and dust just falls out while you are skirting.

Sometimes even we cannot tell that a fleece is too dirty to process. So we have had to reserve the right to charge for fiber cleaning. Sometimes it is not clear how dirty a fleece is until it has passed once through the carder. Although this is rare and we do make every effort to contact the customer before proceeding any further, circumstances may require us to continue and clean the fiber either by sending it through the fiber-separator or by completely re-washing it and starting over.