Tuesday 8 September 2015

Fermenting Fleece part 2

About 4 weeks I set Lambert's fleece to self clean by the Fermenting Suint method 
details of the method can be found here Fermenting Suint
I will start back at the beginning 
 Lambert was sheared you can see how dirty he is
 This was back in spring lovely and clean underneath
 Four weeks ago his fleece was put into a black bin filled with rainwater lid on and left
 Today was the day, I set up and old fire guard (never throw anything away) over a big container
 Took the lid off the bin phew did it stink
 pulled out the fleece and left it to drain
 the water that drained off was poured back into the bin
 and another fleece I was given a few weeks ago was put in to start fermenting
 this fleece should work a lot quicker you can re-use the water lots of times

I rinsed off the fleece with rainwater several times until there was no more smell, the fleece you can see is a lot cleaner and its now drying off in the sunshine, once dry I can card it and then it will be ready for spinning.
It was a bit smelly to do but nothing worse than a muck heap :-)

8 comments:

  1. Looks fab Dawn! I hope you'll post some photos when you get to the spinning stage :)

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  2. Do you / should you ferment alpaca fibre? Or would the lack of lanolin in the fibre inhibit the fermenting?

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    1. no it dosent work with Alpaca because of the lack of lanolin, I have jus been carding and spinning the alpaca then washing after, I give the fleece a good sake i the wind t get some of the dust out, Alpaca isnt as dirty as sheep :-)

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  3. It's made quite a difference, looks much cleaner. :-)

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    1. now have it in the greenhouse drying :-)

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  4. Replies
    1. not really a lot of the time its just sitting around but it is a smelly job :-)

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