or the most part, fiber preparation at Bear River FiberWorks follows
the same steps that fiber workers have used for centuries. The only differences may be the quality and sophistication of the tools.
Even though I use relatively fancy tools, I still rely heavily on nature's own best fiber tools - my hands and eyes.
kirting and Debris Removal
Skirting is the removal of dung tags, mats, second cuts, large debris and sections
of fleece that are hopelessly infused with vegetable matter. I am ruthless. It is better
to toss a little bit of good fiber into the trash than to have a little bit of bad fiber contaminate the rest of a good fleece.
I inspect the fleece and remove the really bad bits. Skirting continues throughout the fiber preparation process because I'm always finding
something that doesn't belong.
Very commonly, tiny bits of veg are found throughout a fleece. When these bits are concentrated and localized, they are easy to remove. When
the veg is not concentrated but rather is diffuse, attempts to skirt it out are not worth the effort because so much fiber would be tossed. Further
processing, by picking, carding will open the fibers and cause some of the remaining veg to drop out but it won't get all of it.
Note: while I can skirt fleeces here, better results are achieved
when the fleece is skirted immediately after shearing. Once the fleece
is put into a bag or box, the bad bits will begin to mix with the
good bits making the bad bits much, much, harder to find and remove.
The best time to remove guard
hairs is while the fleece still has its
lock structure immediately after shearing (FiberWorks no longer
offers a dehairing service).
Some fleeces (primarily llama and alpaca) are tumbled in a large screened
drum that knocks great quantities of dust, veg, and second cuts out
of the fleece. The tumbling also helps to open the fleece so that
washing is more effective. Tumbling of sheep fleeces is not as beneficial
because of the stickiness of the grease.
ashing
Quite a bit of time has been spent fine-tuning the washing process
to account for the chemical composition of the local water. The
process works very well, treats your fiber with care, and avoids
harsh chemicals and rough handling. More ...
Because all fiber must be grease-free before carding, I will rewash
fleeces that arrive with any residual grease. Washing charges are
based on the fleece's grease weight.
icking
Picking opens fiber locks in preparation for washing
or carding. I use a swing picker for everything except fleeces
that are extraordinarily tender.
Those fleeces I pick by hand. There are those who claim that mechanical
picking damages the fibers in the fleece. To some extent I disagree;
a properly adjusted swing picker does no more damage to the fibers
than the carder itself. In fact, picking with a swing picker is really
nothing more than course carding.
arding
The final fiber preparation step I provide is carding.
Carding teases apart the individual fibers and aligns them so that
they are more-or-less parallel with each other. The output from the
carder is a fine web of fibers that can be directed to the bump winder or to the storage
roll from the doffer. The carder is a Patrick Green Jumbo
Exotic carder. It is not the big brother to your drum carder. When
you card with your drum carder you load the carding
cloth of the drum with layer upon layer of fibers. When the drum's
carding cloth is full you pull the fibers off of the drum in the form
of a batt. To make batts with
the Patrick Green, the web of fibers pulled from the doffer is laid
upon the burlap covered surface of the storage roll. A
press roll lightly compacts the fibers on the storage roll. The
result is a progressively thickening batt. The thickness or loft of the batt is purely dependent on the
characteristics of the fibers. To make roving,
the web of fibers from the doffer is directed to the bump winder.
The bump winder draws the fibers through a series of pressure rollers
and channels, lightly drafting the fiber to produce a consistently
formed roving. After the roving is formed it passes through a device
called a wig-wag to the bump
bobbin.
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Last modified: 2010 Feb 15 2327:26 UTC