All About the Fleece

This is a learning experience for us here at Dragon Fleece Farm. We are learning how to process fleece from shearing to the finished product and it takes a long, long time! The first thing we did was sort the the fleece which means we (by "we" I mean me with an occasional helper along the way and a big thank you to her!) pulled out all the "vegetable matter" AKA poop, soil, grass, twigs, leaves, etc.

Here is a picture of one of the fleeces we sorted. You can see all the vegetable matter stuck in the fleece. It takes a little while to sort. We also look for consistent "staple length," which basically means the length of each of the fibers. We are looking for consistent staple length for a better product down the road.

This next picture shows how much

vegetable matter came out of the fleece (the fleece of 8 alpacas). As you can see, there was a considerable amount!

The next thing we did was to wash the fleece. We used special fleece fiber wash with water at a comfortable 120 degrees (Fahrenheit). We washed then rinsed three to four times depending upon how dirty the water was looking. The picture with all the buckets is four buckets with fleece soaking in wash solution and four buckets in stage one of the rinsing. The next picture shows how dirty the water was after a wash and one rinse!

Alpaca love, love, love to roll in the dirt! Below is a picture of Sparkle taking a dirt bath! See her dirt cloud?!! So of course all of that dirt and debris from a whole year is in the fleece!

After the washing and rinsing the fleece needs to dry before we can process it further. Once it is dry we can start carding (basically brushing it like you would your hair). I started but I hurt my shoulder doing farm chores so I am waiting on the doctor's verdict before I can do any further processing. I am also waiting on a carding machine in hopes I can use my other arm to card. After the carding will come the spinning which I am also learning how to do! Hopefully I will be able to add more to my fleece processing journey soon.

Until next time, take care and stay healthy!