Preparing a clean sheep fleece for spinning - commission

Combing sheep fleece

One of my latest commissions is to clean, process and prepare a very special sheep fleece before spinning it into yarn for my client to use. I wrote about the process of cleaning and preparing the fleece in a previous blog post.

Now that the fleece is clean and dry it's time to start preparing it for spinning through carding or combing. There are different ways to prepare fibres for spinning depending on the ultimate use for the fibre, the type of fibre and some personal preference. This post shares the way I choose to do this, however there is lots of other information online too.

The fibres all need to begin to face the same way, or be aligned, to make spinning easier and more smooth. In this instance, I've chosen to comb the fleece which means placing small pieces of the fibre on a comb (in the image above) and then moving a second comb through the fibre to transfer it on to this second comb and begin to tease out the fibre into being more aligned.

combed sheep fleece

It takes several passes of combing to get the fibres to be more manageable, as you can see above the fibres are less curly, more straight and look more uniform. From here the fibre is gently teased off the combs into longer strips.

combed bump of fibre

I then like to wrap the fibre into small 'bumps' to keep it stored more easily until it's time to spin it. This way the fibres stay aligned and it's a compact way to store the fibre.

prepare fibre ready for spinning

The fleece created a lot of fibre, and once prepared and combed a total of 4 large sacks of fibre are ready to be spun.

The next step is to begin spinning and then plying the fibre into yarn ready for my client.

Have you ever used fleece for spinning or other art projects? Let me know in the comments.