Welcome to the latest installment of “Five Words From …” our series which highlights interesting words from interesting books! In this installment, we follow along as Clara Parkes learns not just the process but also the vocabulary of turning fleece into yarn in Vanishing Fleece: Adventures in American Wool.
“The mission here is to make the fibers as parallel and uniform as possible by pulling them through a series of metal pins and an auto-leveler that mechanically adjusts thick and thin areas. They’ll run fibers from multiple canisters together to further blend and unify what comes out the other end. While the woolen system used a good amount of oil to help the fibers hold together, here they only needed a little bit of oil to lubricate the fibers and control static. Once run through the finishers, the resulting fiber is called “sliver,” pronounced “sly-ver”.”
Sliver is untwisted; roving usually has a slight twist to it.
“We’d jumped ahead and started dyeing yarn that had already been prepped earlier in the week. But now, it was time to see how that was done. The process, called “mordanting,” makes it possible for natural dye to fix to fiber in a permanent way. It’s a crucial step that enables that chemical reaction to take place and for dye to attach to wool fibers through what’s called the “ionic process.”
A commonly-used mordant in yarn-dyeing is alum (aluminum sulfate).
“Carbonizing is the process of treating wool with acids to remove vegetable matter. Nobody offers this in the United States anymore.”
In carbonization, the wool is immersed in sulphuric acid, which burns away the vegetable matter but doesn’t harm the wool fibers. The wool is then dried at high heat and the vegetable matter can be mechanically removed.
“The longer a sheep goes unshorn, the greater its risk of “casting,” or losing its balance and tipping onto its back. Unlike beetles, sheep lack the ability to right themselves once this happens. Eventually the gases in the sheep’s rumen build up and press against the diaphragm, causing the sheep to slowly suffocate.”
Other disorders of sheep (and similar animals) include staggers, orf, dunt, loor, charbon, and cratches.
“Sheep didn’t always need our help removing their coats. They used to shed each spring, leaving tufts of wool snagged on bushes and fence posts and in the grabby hands of the humans tending them (the latter being a process called “rooing”).”
In the Shetlands, the hand-pulled wool from moulting sheep was collected in straw baskets called caizies or peerie cubbies.