From sheep to sweater: how to make American wool yarn

I've been knitting for over 20 years. I've handled hundreds thousands of skeins of yarn. But until recently, I had no idea what it really takes to make one.

That changed when my husband Dan and I packed up and headed to Vermont for the inaugural Farm & Fiber retreat — a 3-day, 4-night immersion into the full journey of wool, from overgrown sheep to finished fiber. I went expecting a pleasant knitting retreat with some educational extras. I came home completely obsessed, with raw fleece in my suitcase and a drum carder on order.

Here's the whole arc from sheep to sweater, told through what I saw, smelled, touched, and learned. 

Step 1: Shearing

It starts with a sheep and a very skilled human. At the retreat we watched a shearer named Siri Swanson (her shearing business is the delightfully-named Yankee Clippers.) Siri told us she burns as much energy in a day of shearing as one would from running a marathon. "I can't run a mile without being out of breath," she told us. "But I have incredibly strong muscles where I need them." 

The sheep who are waiting in line to be shorn are quite unhappy (mostly because they're isolated from their flock.) But as soon as Siri positions them so they're on their bums, the sheep are resigned to the fact that they're not going anywhere. They stay calm and still as Siri plows through their lush wool with electric clippers, shearing them in one graceful pass.

Once shorn, the sheep have to reestablish their social hierarchy, which previously had been determined by how woolly they were! 

What's left after shearing is called "raw fleece" — still smelling of lanolin and barn, full of the, ahem, character of that particular animal. (Food that dribbled on the messy eater's chin and chest, BM near the heinie. Straw everywhere.)

Step 2: Skirting

Once the fleece is off the sheep, you don't just bag it up and call it done. (Well, you could, but shepherds pay by weight for wool processing. It's most cost-effective to separate the sheep from the chaff, so to speak.)

Our group of 15 or so stood around a folding table as shepherd Kate spread out a fleece for us to examine.

"This is no good, this is no good," she murmured and, to our untrained eyes, threw perfectly good wool on the ground. Kate explained the difference between skirting for a wool mill (this fleece's destination) and skirting for hand spinning. "Hand spinners can take their time and clean this much more thoroughly. You can take some of the discards," she said to some of us who were sheepishly (sorry) gleaning locks off the ground.

We pulled as much VM (vegetable matter) and BM (yup) out of the fleece as possible. Some of the fleece was colored with raddle paint, which rubbed off from when the rams impregnated the ewes. Who knew?

What remains after skirting is the good stuff: the long, crimpy, lanolin-rich locks that will eventually become yarn. At this point it still looks like something you'd find under a sheep, but you can already feel the potential.

Step 3: Scouring (washing)

Raw fleece is full of lanolin — the natural grease that keeps a sheep's coat weatherproofed. Lanolin is wonderful for the sheep. For spinning, it needs to go. This washing process is called scouring.

Some mills scour and others don't. At Green Mountain Spinnery, scouring was done in an ordinary washing machine modified to stop before the agitation cycle kicks in. In addition, they used a 19th-century cast iron potbelly machine named Bertha. The founders of GMS had found Bertha in a hotel basement.  

After the retreat, I decided to try scouring for myself. I ordered raw merino wool and Unicorn Power Scour on Etsy, and set up a little processing station in my kitchen.

The goal of scouring is to dissolve the lanolin without felting the wool — which means hot water, gentle handling, no agitation, and no sudden temperature changes.

Rookie Mistakes

I was too eager to start scouring and I hadn't skirted enough. Therefore I was essentially laundering poop... 😂

It's much harder to separate VM and BM when the wool is wet. The whole thing looked like a mass of chicken meat scraps -- I put it outside to dry, but fully expected to have to throw it all away.

What you're seeing in the YouTube video (~1 minute)

I plunge the raw merino wool in a plastic tub of water, and soak, and rinse, and repeat, at least half a dozen times!

Step 4: Carding

Several hot, sunny days later, the freshly dried wool didn't look nearly like the disaster I'd remembered. 

But the clean fleece was still a mass of tangled locks. They'd dried into an uneven, lumpy pile. In order to spin it, I needed the fibers to be parallel and even. That's what carding does.

One could start with hand carders (small, handled wooden paddles with wire teeth), but I was ready for a bit of automation at this point. I scored a Brother 4-inch drum carder from a seller on Facebook Marketplace. 

My verdict? Carding is addictive. You put in something that looks like my curly hair after a long night tossing and turning, and what comes off the drum looks like cotton candy — airy, even, almost luminous. 

"Before" on the table; "after" in the bowl.

Step 5: Spinning

This is the step I haven't done yet — at least not with my own hand-processed fiber. I have a Ladybug spinning wheel, and a playdate with it is very much on the calendar. Spinning is where the fiber becomes yarn: the fibers get twisted together under tension into a continuous strand, which can then be plied (twisted together with another strand) for strength and balance.

I'll be writing about this one in real time, with all the beginner mistakes included. Stay tuned!