Last spring while my husband was cleaning out the attic he found a forgotten box of wool that had been stuffed in the attic when we moved into this house 20 years ago. It brought back a lot of memories.
30 years ago when I was just learning to spin my mother wanted to be involved. She lived out in the country and had neighbors who raised sheep commercially. So she asked them if they had some wool she could send me. It was shearing time, so they picked a couple fleeces off the shearing floor and stuffed them into a yellow plastic burlap bag and gave them to her. (Normally they shear all the sheep, stuff all the wool into big bags and send it off to the wool middleman.)
My husband's parents were coming to visit us with their 5th wheel trailer. Since they are friends of my parents and live nearby, my mother asked them is they could take something to me when they went. Of course, they said yes, expecting a birthday gift or book or other small thing. They were taken aback when the something turned out to be a 5' tall bag as big as you could get your arms around full of dirty stinky wool. They knew my mother well enough to know that you can't say no to her, so they stuck it in their trailer. They were very relieved to hand it off to me when they arrived.
I was overwhelmed, and not in a good way. The smell, the amount - it was all a bit much. I read everything I could find, but there were no instructions on how to skirt a raw fleece in your living room with 3 small children helping. (We lived in a second floor apartment - no yard, only a very small deck.) And absolutely nothing on how to properly thank your mother for this type of gift.
I ended up spreading it all out on an old sheet on the living room carpet. First I threw away all the totally dung-covered wool. Then I divided the rest into different quality groups. That's what the instructions I could find said to do, not that I knew what good quality was. Then I stuffed it back into the bag and put it out on the deck.
I washed some of it by filling the bathtub with hot water and soap and putting in as much wool as I could fit in. I let it soak for an hour or so, and then let the water out. I held the wool back while I let some rinse water fill the tub again. Then I let the rinse water soak for another hour or so. Then I let the water out of the tub, squeezed as much water as I could out of the wool, and laid it out on a sheet in the living room to dry. It was the best I could do at the time. We moved soon after receiving the wool, so some of it had to be washed later at our new home.
The wool my husband found was some of this first wool to be washed. It had been in white plastic garbage bags in a moving box that had never been open through 3 moves. Would it be any good after all this time and poor handling? I put it in quarantine in the guest bathroom for a month, just in case it had picked up moths, and decided that I would find something to do with it.
Could the wool be saved?
From Dave (Fawn's husband): I can say that seeing Fawn go through the wool cleaning process really made me appreciate what many of our ancestors went through to make clothing. And, I seem to recall that it took a while to get the smell out of my parents' trailer.
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