I discovered early into my adventures in spinning, I wanted to spin every fiber I could get my hands on. But with a tight budget I was going to have to work for it. So I started to look into purchasing raw fleece and how to process or clean it. I knew it would be work but it would give me enough fiber for each breed to have room to make mistakes. My first fleece was a 4lbs Cormo and fairly clean. Very little VM and grease so it was a cake walk to clean. With it I experimented with Kool-Aid and food coloring dye pots and making batts on a drum carder. I got a taste and wanted more. Along came my girlfriend, who said she had two big Rambouillet fleece that had sat for years boxes in her garage and would I be interested in processing them for her. Sure Why not! These were very dirty, loaded w VM, heavy in grease, and perfectly formed to the square shape from the box from sitting in the Vegas heat. So I set out to clean these bad boys. Three big black bins of hot water from the tap, a bottle of soap and a mess of mesh bags. It’s took days just to get through one and a lot of back pain, but I ended up with close to 8lbs of lovely white fleece from just one. 15lbs in total from both and days of back wrenching work.
Through the process I learned my scouring process used entirely too much water for were I lived. Living the Las Vegas Valley, in Southern Nevada water is a precious commodity and your neighbors notice when you are pouring buckets of dirty mucky water into your plants. I needed to find a better way. Processing raw wool was a happy place for me, but it would take me days to recover just from washing. So I went searching the internet and found the Suint Fermentation Method. It seamed pretty easy, get a good size dark opaque plastic tub with lid, fill with rain water or from the hose, add a raw fleece, and ignore for a few weeks. Too easy, and extremely stinky, revolting in fact, but it works. Suint works by using the natural salts in the sweat left in the fleece and bacteria to eat away at the dirt n lanolin. Medium grease seems to be best and allow one to clean an entire fleece at once, plus you can use the same tub of water 3 or 4 times. The first fleece I used was a big grey Finn from Sophia. So I waited for a good rain and set my buckets out to fill my tub, it took 20 gallons of rain water. I bagged my fleece in 2 large mesh wash bags and put them in, adding a layer of black plastic bags between the tub and lid to keep the bugs out and walked away.
It took about 4 weeks to get a good heat and fermentation going. New tubs take longer I read. I was curious but after reading on a social media group page for SFM just how nasty the smell was, I avoided peaking. When the day came to rinse I did it first thing, before most of my neighbors were up to avoid offending them with the odor, rinsing with the hose and a good pressure sprayer, over a 15 gallon tub I rinsed the entire fleece and filled the tub. Being early summer my plants enjoy and good drink and since there was no chemicals or soap it was safe for all my garden beds. Next step was to lay it out in the sun it went for a good dry. It still had a light touch of lanolin left so another few days would not have hurt. Seeing it was the first go, with a learning curve, I took it as a successful experience and my back was happy, 3 hours vs. days of hard work.
Since I only had one fleece at the time to clean but plan to order more I just covered it back up and left it. Next fleece to go in was a cream colored Perendale for my friend Christin. Since my tub had sat outside in the Vegas heat, it need a bit more water. No biggie, a fabulous winter rain topped it off and it was ready to go. So again I split the fleece into to bags put it and walked away. It was still really cool at night still, I have it plenty of time to get nice and nasty smelling, but this time about a week before I planed to rinse I flipped the bags so ensure a even soak. The tub sat for 3 weeks due to weather, we get a lot of wind in the spring and it was a wet spring too. But in the end it was a great success this time. I added an extra rinse the next day using roughly 15 gallons extra water but it made big difference in the final result and was still ¼ the water I used washing just one Rambouillet fleece.