October 1998:
How to comb wool that's too short to comb.
The instructions on my new combs said, "Wool must be at least two inches to comb." The Dorset-Corriedale gift fleece I had dyed with goldenrod was barely that, but it was dense and bouncy and I wanted to mix it with camel down. The obvious thing to do was pick and card it, but this was a seriously dirty fleece, full of hay even after washing, and also the picked fleece was very noil-ey, full of the little balls of broken wool that make handspun yarn bumpy. The drum carder doesn't get out much hay, and doesn't comb out noils. It looked like combing or not using.
BUT -- it wouldn't comb anyway. Even picked, the dense, springy, down-type wool wouldn't go over the sharp teeth of the combs. What to do? My husband suggested doing all of the above: picking, carding, THEN combing. It worked! The pass through the carder opened up the dense fiber enough to easily lash the batts onto English combs. I then combed the wool and got out all the noils and all the hay with one or two passes through the four-pitch combs, and pulled out the combed fiber. There was a lot of waste; maybe as much as half went for pillow stuffing; but I didn't care because this was a marginal fleece anyway for handspinning because of its short staple. See the right side of the illustration for the ultimate spinning material!
Seems almost a shame to mix it with the camel down, but the tremendous clinginess of this kind of wool may stabilize the fine camel hair.
I decided to buy a Clun Forest ewe for a longer staple, fine down-type fleece, and breed her with a Rambouillet ram in hopes of getting a longer staple of this same useful and soft type of fleece.
