raw fleeces...

The past week I decided to make a start to felt the fleeces I had collected the last few years. I wanted to make small rugs which is easier for me to handle. I have different kind of fleeces from different breeds.  Every breed asks for another treatment is my experience sofar. You should think that I'm a weltrained felter after all those year, but working with raw fleeces is something new for me. I had a couple of questions on my mind. For example, how much shrinkage does a fleece of raw wool need. How much backingwool shall I use. How to clean it. Which method will work for me.  

I started with the wool of the Schoonebeeker sheep, which has long hair. The fleece was a big one and it gave me 6 small rugs. Somehow I couldn't find a good way to get all those hair attached to my backingwool from mountainsheep. A lot of them came of after I had felted it, but fortunately there was enough hair to cover the surface. I was wondering why this was happening. Maybe it was because I had spread them to much? Next time I will have to make a new test again.

On the rack you can see from left to right: Veluws Moorlandsheep,  the grey one is a cross of Kerry Hill and Veluws Moorland, little piece of brown is from Skudde with long woolhair, again Veluws Moorlandsheep and on the right side there is an unknown fleece from a local farm. The fleeces of the moorlandsheeps felted very fast, while the one of the local farm took a long time to become a good one. The moorlandfleece had a lot of annoying burs and thistels in it, hidden deep down in the wool and only visible after felting. Because it was sheared early this year the fleece is very soft, but also very loose and sometimes with very short fibers. I had to look twice to get the sheerside up. But the result is like a teddybear! Soft and wooly...