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A Brief History of Wool
"Hanna" and her 2 day-old buckling kid
Mohair-producing Angora Goats
Beckon Hill Farm, Harbor Springs MI |
Sheep evolved in the Pleistocene era, some 1,000,000 years ago. They were domesticated in South West Asia around 9,000 B.C. when humans developed a symbiotic relationship with grazing animals, providing protection from predators in exchange for food and clothing. Around 3,500 B.C., people discovered how to spin wool.
The Greeks, Romans, and Persians all contributed to the development of sheep breeding. The Hebrews on the plains of Mesopotamia around 3,000 B.C. were accomplished shepherds with numerous references in the New and Old Testaments. The Romans likely introduced sheep to Europe and North Africa. |
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Scottish Blackface flock,
Irish Acres Sheep Farm, Charlevoix County, Mi |
Facts about wool
The wool fiber is the most complex natural textile fiber. It absorbs moisture yet repels water; it stretches, then springs back to shape; it resists dirt, yet absorbs dyes.
Wool is water resistant and repels odor.
Wool can absorb up to 30% of it's weight in moisture, and wick it into the air. This keeps you warm when it's cool and cool when it's warm. Synthetics, by contrast, do not absorb moisture, wick it way from the body to the fiber surface which makes you feel clammy when its warm and chilly when it's cool.
Wool has a natural crimp that gives it the advantages of elasticity, flexibility, loft, resilience over other fibers. The result is greater comfort, durability, warmth, and shape retention.The natural crimp of wool separates the fibers. Crush a hand full of wool and watch it spring back to shape.
A wool fiber can be bent up to 20,000 times without breaking. Compare this to 3,200 times for cotton and 1,800 for silk.
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"Wark", Bluefaced Leicester Ram
Beckon Hill Farm, Harbor Springs MI
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Glossary of Wool Terms
Batting: Fiber carded into a mat of interwoven fiber of consistent thickness and weight. Used in the stuffing of quilts, pillows, dolls, and mattresses. Also used by some hand spinners, and often used for making felted fabrics. Generally are in wide widths.
Clean Wool: Scoured wool available for market use.
Carded Fiber: Fiber that has been processed to prepare it for spinning. Carding removes debris and tangles from the wool locks. It is also a useful method for blending different fibers and colors. Carded fiber can be produced into many different products: batting, roving, and pencil roving.
Core Testing: The sampling of bales or bags of wool using a "core sampler", which collects a representative sample of the wool being tested. These samples are then tested to determine the yield, clean content, and fiber grade of the wool.
Fiber Quality: Fiber quality is also commonly referred to as grade of wool. The diameter of individual wool fibers determines the grade of wools. The diameter of wool is measured in microns, or millionth of a meter.
Grease Wool: Wool which has been shorn off the animal, but has not been washed (scoured) or processed. Also referred to as Raw Wool.
Handle or Hand: A term referring to the actual feel of wool.
Lamb's Wool: Wool taken from a lamb not over seven months old.
Luster: A wool characteristic determined by the amount of light reflected by the fiber.
Pencil Roving: A thin roving; it is the final stage of fiber alignment undergone during the commercial yarn spinning process.
Protein Fiber: Fiber derived from animals such as sheep, alpacas, llamas, goats, and rabbits.
Roving: A slightly twisted roll of wool produced during processing before it is spun into yarn.
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Scouring: The process of washing dirt, grease and foreign matter from grease wool.
Scoured wool: Wool which has been washed in a process using warm water and detergents to remove grease, suint (salts of perspiration from sheep found in raw wool), dirt, and foreign matter from grease wool. Generally, the dirt, grease, suint, and other foreign matter comprises about 50% of the weight of grease wool.
Top: Clean wool which has been combed into roving containing only parallel fibers, in preparation for worsted spinning.
Woolen Yarn: Yarn spun from wool fibers which have been carded but not combed.
Worsted Yarn: Yarn spun from wool fibers which have been combed.
Yield: Amount of clean wool derived from grease wool in the scouring process. |
Lilly Ann Matchett with yrs. fleece harvest
Matchett Sheep Farm, Charlevoix County, MI
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Fiber Processing
Organic Wool Processing
Restricts chemical inputs and requires the separation of organic and non-organic fibers throughout processing stages.
Shearing & Grading
The first step in processing wool, shearing, takes place on the farm or ranch, most often in spring, just before lambing. A skillful shearer, using electric hand clippers, can shear a sheep in about 5 minutes, using long, smooth strokes close to the skin that preserve the length of the fiber and maximize the value of the fleece.
The shearer typically peels the fleece off in one piece. A co-worker rolls, ties, and stuffs it into a long bag with 19 to 39 other fleeces. The bag, weighing between 200 to 400 pounds, is marked to identify its source (owner) before it goes to the warehouse.
Next come the buyers, the judges of the value of the wool. Repeatedly they take core samples of the bags to measure fiber length and diameter, but also to assess residual amounts of dirt, plastic, and vegetable matter. Experienced graders can make their assessments by visual inspection. The buyers then bid on "the lot".
Fine and medium-fine wools of longer staple lengths (more than three inches) are desirable for light-weight worsted suit and dress fabrics. Coarser and shorter fibers, under three inches long, are used mostly for bulky sweater and carpet yarns.
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Washing and Scouring
The next step is washing, or "scouring," the wool to remove grease (unrefined lanolin), vegetable matter and other impurities remaining from the range, feedlot, or shearing floor. A set of rakes moves the fleeces through a series of scouring tubs of soap and water. Impurities can account for 30 to 70 percent of raw (unscoured) fleece weight. The first wash waters are warmed to 140 degrees F, followed by cold rinses. The wool passes through squeeze rollers and a hot-air drying chamber reduces the moisture content to the desired level. The grease in wool is a wonder of its own... lanolin. It is separated from the wash water (oil and water don't mix), and purified for eventual use in a wide variety of creams, soaps, and cosmetics.
Blending and Dyeing
Clean wools from different batches or lots are often blended-mixed mechanically-at this stage. Blending minimizes the basic color variables of raw wool and standardizes staple length and diameter, resulting in uniform quality.
Wool fiber is so absorbent that dyeing at any stage of processing is equally effective. Wool dyed immediately after it is scoured (washed) and blended is "stock-dyed." Spun into yarn and it's" yarn-dyed." Woven into fabric and it is "piece-dyed."
Patterned fabric is woven with either stock-dyed or yarn-dyed threads. Plain-colored fabrics are usually piece-dyed. And woolen fabrics can, of course, be screen- or roller-printed in myriad colors and patterns.
Carding
The carding process passes the cleaned and dry wool through wire rollers to straighten fibers and remove remaining vegetable matter. The rollers vary in diameter and turn at different speeds in order to create a thin web of aligned fibers. Smooth steel fingers then divide the web and roll the strands over onto one another to create narrow continuous ropes of fibers called "slivers".
If the batch of wool is of coarser fiber and shorter staple length (three inches or less), the machinery gently twists the slivers into ropelike strands called "roving" and winds them into balls ready for spinning.
If the batch is of finer fiber and longer staple length (longer than three inches), the slivers usually go to combing and drawings steps that prepare them to be spun into worsted yarn.
Spinning
Before it is suitable for weaving or knitting, roving for both woolen and worsted yarns goes through the spinning process. Spools of roving are placed on the spinning frame, their ends drawn through small rollers to extend the wool fibers still further. Finally, the spinning machines twist and retwist the roving into yarns of various strength, firmness, size, and ply.
Weaving and Knitting
Weaving produces cloth by interlacing two sets of yarn at right angles. Yarns running lengthwise in the loom are the "warp", while yarns running crosswise form the filling or "weft". As each warp yarn passes through the loom, it is raised and lowered by a wire eyelet through which it is threaded. As yarns are raised and lowered by cycles of the loom, a weft yarn is carried by a shuttle (commonly by a rapier or air jet) through the opening created by the warp yarns. This sequence, after many repetitions, forms woven fabrics of infinite variety.
Knitted fabrics are produced by interlocking rows and loops of yarns. As new loops are formed, they are drawn through those previously shaped. This inter-looping and the continued formation of new loops produces knit fabric. Knitting machines are as versatile as looms. Their mechanical needles are more accurate and many times faster than hand knitting. A circular knitting machine produces mainly jersey and a variety of double knits. Flat knitting machines produce yard goods such as tricot and raschel knits.
Prepared by the American Sheep Industry Association, Inc. |
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