We finally washed our raw wool! Not all of it, just one sheep’s worth.

In the South, Spring shows up early, and this year, it is demanding our attention more than ever. We have not gotten around yet to cleaning up this place – the barn is a disorganized mess, there are tools scattered from several projects, animals wait for new infrastructure, vet and hoof care, and the garden still has her leaf covering on. And we probably have some pregnant sheep.

Since I am a bit slowed down with this baby, I am looking for little wins. I bite off my to-do list in increments – one day, I get all my materials out, the next I clear a space, the next day I may actually get to it. Baby girl will nap wherever I put her portable crib, so the other day, I quietly washed a bag of wool with her by my side.

The fleece was from a smaller ewe named Biddy, a chocolate colored Shetland x baby doll sheep we sheared last summer.

This was the first time we had ever washed raw wool, let alone wool we raised ourselves and had shorn ourselves.

It took about 4 rinses to get the water to run clear. After the batches were all washed, we lay the clumps down on a drying rack for a couple days.

When the wool was bone dry, we picked through it while talking about the sheep, finding evidence of her shenanigans. We found fossilized bugs, burrs, remnants of vegetation that grew last year, things she got into, things we got her into.

Biddy cleaned up well, better than I expected, given she probably had more than one year of growth on her and was a total mess, much like our other sheep. The white wool we got off our white sheep, ended up in the compost or being used as a mulch. After all, this was wool we inherited; it was these sheep’s first year getting shorn with us. We don’t know any of the original ewes ages, if they had previously lambed or been shorn. Our flock is sort of a ragtag bunch.

Washing wool was like being in art class again, experimenting and having fun working with a medium for the first time. We are also growing that medium – a thing we can hold, experiment with, sell, give away, craft into something. Perhaps, this is where art therapy intersects with farming, an idea I have been exploring lately.

If you’ve ever washed laundry by hand, that’s what it looks like. It is a slow process of manually agitating, submerging the wool under the water and stirring the batch with a stick. A process to get lost in thought while doing.

We have had some losses this winter. Our Indian Runner drake got viciously attacked by an aerial predator and left alive. Our black Barnevelder rooster dropped dead and my son found him stiff as a board. I sold some adult hens just to reduce the flock chaos. I traded two solid rams with a local shearer for vet care, narrowly avoiding a parasite catastrophe (simply because the winter brings their rotational grazing to a screeching halt). I have been feeling badly about my ability to keep animals going.

Our family is also eating a more plant-based diet, which is fueling the doubt I have about spending time on creatures, instead of on the garden. The animals take the most time and energy, and they always come first. If we are eating less meat and eggs, is it even worth it? Why bother?

I asked myself the same thing about processing wool from scratch – was it even worth it? Old fiber-timers have warned me that “it’s a lot of work”.

Indeed, washing just one bag of wool was ‘a lot of work’ – work that I enjoyed, work that I would say I needed. Work that is real and tangible. Work that I can see children doing and enjoying. Work that gives you perspective. Work that makes you appreciate where textiles and clothing comes from. Work that women have done for centuries, to clothe their children, to carry on a form of folk art, and to simply live in a closed loop.

Wool has endless potential and working with it is empowering. I am starting to notice that things we think are not worth doing, we outsource, but surely that comes at a price. When we don’t know where something comes from, we are dependent on someone.

Maybe I am not knitting my own clothing tomorrow (or anything like it) but I can appreciate a slower way of producing a textile. At the very least, I consider myself enlightened, just by trying to start from scratch. Their wool seems worth the work and in the meantime, they can cut our grass for us.