Dressing mixtures

By coincidence but following on beautifully from the last post, I've received a question by email this week about dressing mixture.

If you find spinning easier with a little grease still present but your fleece is very dry after scouring, you can spray it with an oily mixture called dressing mixture.

I notice that Anne Field's original Ashford Book of Spinning (no longer in print) gave three recipes, one of which matches my correspondent's own recipe, that being:

• one part of water, one part of olive oil and a quarter part of ammonia 

She says that the ammonia may not be easy to obtain from your chemist, and this may be the reason that this particular recipe doesn't appear in the current Ashford book of Hand Spinning - it keeps two simpler oil / water recipes.

pour the the liquids into a plant sprayer and shake up well to make an emulsion.

My friend's tips are to spray sparingly and to spray the fleece at least a day before spinning (but note that the mixture may become rancid over a long period of time).

Scouring fleece

With the difficulties I've had obtaining the scour and wash I have been using / selling, it was great to receive these samples in the post from Aussie Know How. As I have been trying them I thought it would be a good idea to write about how to scour a fleece at the same time.

We're aiming to wash and rinse out the dirt and lanolin from the raw fleece without felting it. Therefore agitation has to be kept to a minimum. I like using these net bags (available from your dry-cleaning or pound store) as they make it easier and cleaner to handle the fleece and help you to handle the fleece without rubbing the fibres together too much. Don't pack too much in a bag - the water needs to flow through the fibre.

Carefully place those bags in the hot soapy water. The raw fleece can handle hot water as long as you don't move it around too much and don't transfer it to water of a different temperature. The new product says 20ml per 10litres (that's 2 gallons or one big bucketful). So for my bathful I calculated 80ml, about the same quantity that I'd have used of Power Scour.  I would normally leave to soak for 20 mins, but this product says 'paddle after 5 mins'. I'm not quite sure what that means but the aim is to allow the water to flow around the fibre and carry out the dirt, without allowing the fibres to rub together.

I call this 'sheep soup'. It's amazing what dirt is trapped in the fleece. After this first wash, the instructions suggest using the spin cycle or gently squeeze to take out the dirty water before rinsing. I would generally be more cautious and simply leave to drain on a rack for a few minutes rather than spin or squeeze. These bags then needed two changes of rinse water before the water was running clear. I do use the spin cycle (slow spin) to take out most of the water, with the fleece still in the net bags.

Evaluation of the new Fibre Scour

The essential oils (Tea Tree and Lemon Myrtle - antibacterial) smell very strong but pleasant. I assume that the product contains enough of these to be effective rather than just a token amount.

At suggested concentration, the new product has cleaned the grease more effectively than I expected.  Usually I wash only once in order to take out the dirt and some of the grease leaving a little of the lanolin on the fibres which aids combing and spinning. Now that this fibre has dried (it takes a couple of days to be completely dry) it feels much drier (ie free of grease) than I'd expect. In future I think I will try using a little less product.

[UPDATE] I now have these items (500ml bottles) available at http://handspinner.co.uk/scour_wash_rinse.html

Power scour test - update

Thanks to everyone who's taken an interest in this, particularly to Sophie for prompting me to update. It's good to know that people are interested in this.

It's obviously all dry now, and bagged up. (Using the bags that charities put through your letter box to collect your textiles - they're perfect - just the right size and have vent holes.)

The bags are labeled, but without looking at which was which, I've just stuck my face into each for a good sniff and put my hands in for a good rummage.

I can't really spot any difference. There's still a slight hint of lanolin in both, but that's normal for me - I've only ever washed once before rinsing, and so that's what I've done here.

The next step is to drum card it all and see whether there's any difference there, but (bad timing) my drum carder is out on loan for another couple of weeks.

I think as I've got the time, I'll give it a second wash which might make any differences more obvious.