After visiting the snake dens, Lisa, Joyce and I traveled further west to Sheeples, a sheep farm with a wool processing facility.
Kim toured us through the farm yard to meet her 250+ sheep. All individually named! Most of her sheep are a Marino blend as they are produced specifically for the fine wool. She was able to catch up with a few of the tamer ones so that we could see and feel their fleece. The outer fleece is coarse, due to weathering, but the under locks are amazingly soft and fine!
Kim also showed us her wool processing shed. There they have many machines to speed up the labour intensive process of taking raw wool sheared of the sheep into fine spun yarn, knitted and woven items.
First Kim cleans the wool in a regular washing machine with the agitator removed. The wool is cleaned with very hot water and soap, but it can not be agitated or it will felt into a huge tangled ball.
Once the wool is cleaned Kim finger picked it (usually a 1/2 hour job) to get out any vegetable matter (straw and seeds) that did not get washed out. Then she puts the clean picked fleece through a giant electric carder! She puts it through the carder a few times. This further cleans out and vegetable matter and straightens the fibres in to a smooth sheet or tube of roving.
This is the final step for manufacturing quilt batting. The sheets that come off the carder are 2 X 3 feet. Kim layers and rubs these sheets together to produce various sized battings. I am excited to try a wool batting in one of my quilts!
From the carder Kim can get roving just by threading the thin sheets of wool through a hole producing the tube shaped roving. Kim sells these chunks of roving to spinners, who will hand spin the roving into yarn; or to felters who will use this material to created felted items.
If the wool is to go further and get processed into yarn it needs to be smoother for the mechanical spinners. Therefor, the roving from the carder goes through the pin comber. The pin comber has many combs made of sharp pins that comb the fibres. This machine combs the roving until it is the perfect density to go through the mechanical spinners. The spinners are loaded with the perfect density roving and spin the thread into bobbins. These threads can also be yes on the same machine to produce various yarns - worsted weight, chunky, etc.
The yarn can be sold at this stage or Kim can either weave or knit the yarn too. She has a couple of looms as well as 4 or 5 knitting machines. Right now she is knitting sock blanks and hand dyeing them to be sold to customers who then knit socks with them.
It was amazing to see the Sheeples processing of wool. A great visit and very inspiring! Of course I had to buy some fibre to take home. I bought some gorgeous locks from a Merino Tunis cross fleece. As well as some hand dyed roving in a yellow/green/purple colourway. A great day!!
Twin Merino lambs. Aren't they cuties?!?
A group of the 250 sheep grazing.
Close-up of a couple of ewes.
More pasture - see the llama in the shot?
Large drum carder being fed locks and then some once carded fleece.
Close up of the rollers on the carder.
Back end of the carder where the carder sheet of wool is being drawn into roving,
which goes into the bin. Often this roving is recarded until it is very smooth.
The next machine is the pin comber.
Kim is showing us one of the many metal pin combs that are within the machine.
Kim is threading a batch of roving into the pin comber.
Kim threading the spinning machine that will produce one strand of yarn from the roving.
Winding yarn onto cones from a skein.
