How to Skirt a Fleece

Skirting a fleece as it comes off an animal (before it is jammed in a bag) saves an immense amount of sorting time later if your goal for that fleece is to maximize its value by custom processing.  The highest quality yarn can be spun from the "saddle" of the fleece if vegetable contamination is minimal and the fleece is not tender.  An exception to this rule, especially if the animal has been fed hay or grain from overhead, or the animal had an opportunity to lay under its feeders, is the stripe down the backbone.  It can be noticeably more contaminated by vegetable matter than the rest of the fleece.  We pull this out and send it to the wool warehouse.  While we have the capability to remove heavy vegetable contamination, it is not normally economical for us to do so.

For sheep, in general, the second quality fiber runs around the edges of the saddle.  This wool is excellent for felting if it is clean enough to be opened after scouring.  Its tendency is to be shorter, less-consistent staple length than the saddle, more contaminated with grit, and possibly discolored and low strength from contact with the ground when the sheep rests.  The saddle of a tender fleece can be blended in nicely with the good second quality wool.  We can process exceptionally clean, unusually high quality fiber of this type.

Also for sheep, the third quality fiber is the belly wool; coarse, hairy fiber on the tail, and legs; and matty, short wool on the top knot, face and neck.  Our practice with this wool is to send it to a wool warehouse unprocessed.  It still has a value in the 25 to 75 cent per pound range. 

Our practice with dung tags and exceptionally dirty or felted fiber that our system is unlikely to clean properly is to recycle it to the pasture.

Angora goats are similar to skirting sheep, although an excellent specimen can have good mohair over nearly all of its body.   The main criteria for downgrading mohair is vegetable contamination; matted or tender fleece; significantly shorter locks than the average of the fleece; kempy, hairy fiber that does not resemble mohair; or dung tags.  Mohair fleeces, especially those excellent ones, do not come off in a nice sheet that hangs together well.  The locks tend to be more separate.  Skirting mohair is a harder job than skirting sheep's wool.  There are fewer wool warehouses that accept mohair.

For alpacas and llamas, the most common skirting criteria are to segregate the saddle and call everything else seconds.  We have an American Wool Handbook published in the 1940's that suggests, for alpacas, segregating the saddle, the neck as seconds, and everything else as thirds.  We have found there may be merit in that approach.  A big problem with both species, though less so with the alpaca, in general, is guard hair.  The 3-level sort tends to segregate the worst of the guard hair for alpacas in the thirds.  Our old books tell us that the best upholstery stuffing is animal hair.  Based on our attempts to felt the thirds, this may be the absolute truth.  The neck wool tends to be shorter than the saddle, but it can be combined with other, similar-length necks and spun into yarn or felted.

Most llamas have a lot of guard hair in every part of the fleece.  We have seen, however, everything from relatively light guard hair contamination to contamination so extensive that the guard hair far outweighs the wool.  In the latter case, the whole fleece goes into our upholstery stuffing bag.  A fleece of this type would normally not have its value enhanced enough by our processing to cover the cost of the processing.  

It is probably safe to assume that one of your decisions related to processing your alpaca, is whether to dehair or not.  In the case of light guard hair contamination, it is an esthetic decision.  Since there is so much variation in camelids with respect to guard hair, pre-shearing inspections of each animal can help you put the right parts of the fleece in the right bag.

More Skirting Details:

• For wool that hangs together well as a fleece, throw your freshly-shorn fleece on a table whose surface is rods or pipes spaced about an inch apart.  This lets second-cuts, dirt and other undesirables fall through.

• For mohair, alpaca, llama, or any smooth-fibered wool or wool that falls apart into locks, a sorting table top made of 1-inch x 1-inch galvanized or plastic mesh is better.  This is the one to have if you only have one table.

• If you have a professional shearer and sheep fleeces that hang together, get him/her to show you how to pick it up and throw it on the table properly.  Then skirting is mostly walking around the table.

• Test each fleece in the saddle area for tenderness.  A small lock of fiber should sound like a strummed string instrument when grasped by the extreme ends and jerked hard.  If it thuds, it is probably tender enough for our machines to damage.  Tenderness can define the line between the saddle and the seconds for felting.

• If you have the luxury of sorting during shearing, it is also an excellent time to combine similar fleeces into larger lots.  We use large burlap bags.  The wool warehouses like big, special plastic or nylon bags, but accept burlap.

If you have made it this far into our information, you are really ready to plan your custom-processing project and give us a call!  Your product will be great!