Wool...1 Bag Full

After shearing the sheep, we now need to decide what we are going to do with the wool.

If I have this correct, there are 3 steps to take raw wool and turn it into a useable fibre.  First thing is to clean the wool. 

Step 1 - Separate Good From The Bad.

On the back of the trailer, I spread out each fleece, and pulled out the mud, poo, grass. Basically anything that wasn't wool, had to be removed.

From the black trolley to the trailer, pick out the nasty's, then the good wool goes into the wool sack. At a guess we have ended up with 30-40KG of wool.

Step 2 - Washing The Wool

We need to wash the wool to remove the remaining nasty's, grease, and some of the lanolin in the wool. Now my plan has changed a little. Originally I was going to take the wool to a commercial wool cleaner, but at a cost of around $10 per kg plus GST, it is not economical to do that.

I've been reading online people cleaning their own raw wool, using hot water and detergent. Being a DIY Master, if I do say so myself, and I do have an old spare washing machine in working condition. So I'm going to give this a go myself.

Step 3 - Carding

This is working the wool into a useable fibre. Again I was going to have this done by a commercial wool processor, the same people that wash and clean the wool, but again the cost, you can pay up to $15 per kg plus GST to card the wool.  So again crazy expensive.

I could have been paying up to $30KG per KG to turn the wool into a useable fibre... and then it still needs to be spun. It's just not economical.

So this is an incomplete post, sorry about that, but I will post and update with more details on the process and how we got on with the washing of the wool and then carding of the wool.