SHIPPING WOOL
We decided to send off some of our extra wool for processing at a mill. Phebe washed three batches of raw wool, which weighed out to about 25 pounds in total, after drying. Fluffy, washed wool takes up a lot of space; it pretty much filled three 55 gallon clear plastic drum liner bags. Not much of that wool was going to fit into even the largest cardboard computer box we had available. In fact, if we found a box large enough, it would probably be too large to ship via UPS.
Phebe mentioned seeing an ad in a catalogue for a heavy plastic traveling bag with a vacuum cleaner port in the side. When you're traveling, you put your bulky clothes in, suck out the air with your vacuum, and voila! You can fit a lot more compressed clothing into your suitcase. She thought they would probably work on raw wool as well as a woolen sweater, but they were about $30 each, which would be prohibitively expensive. Paul decided to try vacuum packing the wool in their current bags. The clear drum liners were made by the Berkley & Jensen, cost less than a quarter each, and seemed very sturdy at 1.00 mil thickness.
In the top picture on the left, Paul is inserting the vacuum cleaner tube into the bag. For the first bag, we put a tea strainer over the tube to prevent the wool from being sucked up, but that proved unnecessary, so we didn't bother with the strainer for the next two bags. Holding the bag tightly around the tube, we turned on the vacuum cleaner.
The compacting was quick and humorous. We think that they probably used to do something like this for old monster movie special effects, like when Dracula shrinks to dust in the sunlight. The second picture was only 9 seconds after the vacuuming started, and the bag is already at about half its original volume. One thing to be careful of is to keep a bit of tension on the "neck" of the bag by lifting slightly with the hand holding the bag around the tube. This prevents the bag from sagging and being sucked into the tube, blocking any more air from being sucked out of the bag.
The final picture, when we turned off the vacuum, was 25 seconds after turning it on. At that point, no more shrinkage was evident and the wool was less than a third of its original volume. It's important to grasp the bag tightly as you withdraw the tube so that very little air rushes back in to expand the bag. We spun the bag to twist the neck tight, tied a bag tie around it as far down as possible, then tied another knot by twisting the plastic neck in and around itself. As we finished vacuum packing each bag, we put it into the shipping box. All three bags went in easily and we locked the top flaps over them, so that if a bag sprang a slow leak overnight, it wouldn't have anywhere to expand.
Index to Past Wool-working Tips: