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Wednesday, July 7, 2021
Teasing Board
So, you are mighty proud of your alpaca. He or she has taken his or her halter class and then you entered the fleece in a show and it did well there, too. So, that’s great. But how much do you really know about this fleece? So, I am issuing a throw down to all of those that both show and sell fiber products. Select one fleece that you would be willing to hand process at home and make a few hours each day available in order to make spinning batts of this fleece. If you are as busy with barns and herd health maintenance as I am, this may only be a few hours each day, but I guarantee you will learn a great deal about your fleece.
I have a boatload of fleece that I need to start sending out to mills. I have skirted and done an initial “sort” as to grade of each fleece. But since I ran out of nice alpaca to spin on my group of e-spinners as well as knowing the wait time on receiving processed fiber from mills, I decided to select a fleece I really love and a male that did extremely well in the show-ring. As a fiber sorter, I had looked already at six samples taken from withers, mid-side and stifle on both sides and examined these for tenderness, staple length uniformity, essential grade, presence of strong primaries, type of fleece frequency, and I had skirted the fleece. It’s a large, weighty fleece for a light silver gray. Is it my most elite fleece on the farm? Since I have pursued elite whites here since 2002, it’s not the most elite but it has many excellent qualities, and extremely uniform fineness.
I am one of those who does not believe in washing fleeces necessarily. Here are my tools I employ to hand-process a fleece. I have a teasing board. A lot of drum carders come with them, and you can buy teasing boards. They come with a C-clamp so you can clamp them to a table. If you prefer you can always use a dog flicker brush to clean fiber, but the teasing board is my preference, as I can run a group of staples through cut side and tip side and on both sides, and the teasing board stays in place. I have an idea in my mind of what is the best size in terms of groups of staples so that I have less waste and when finished I have exactly the size of a staple that would go into my drum carder without overloading. You can see a picture of my teasing board in the images provided.
It’s a pretty basic thing, but working from the tip side of a section of the fleece (I prefer to work with sections of the fleece), I pull my group of staples. I firmly grasp the center of the group I have pulled and twist once to ensure I have a firm purchase on the staple, then comb it tip side first through the teasing board on that half, then turn it over and comb again on the other side, then reverse the staple in my hand and do the cut end, again, both sides. Now, rest assured, you will have a lot of dirt and you will have some waste. In fact, you will appreciate the “shrinkage” that your mills you deal with see from doing this exercise. When I pull the staples, if there are “fuzzies,” which are cross fibers, I pull them and place them in the waste category. Yes, I realize I could be pitching some very fine fiber but when teasing the fiber, these fuzzies are going to wind up on the teasing board anyway.
Okay, you may also run into a particularly FILTHY part of the fleece and it may have absolutely GORGEOUS architecture, but if it truly is too dirty – and you can see this because the cut side is just as dark with dirt as is the tip side – this will not yield a clean fiber that you would want to spin! Throw it out. If you just cannot bear the thought of throwing away such beautiful stapled and organized fleece, then be prepared to clean your teasing board very often! So, your guy likes to cush in dried manure piles before you or your help can get out to rake it up. That is life. I should mention that my animals are bedded inside the barn on screened sand with high calcium lime mixed in to combat any nasties. Our paddocks are sandy and it means when I dry lot animals, they really are high and dry! Only when we are expecting zero or subzero and windy conditions do I lay out straw around the areas where my animals congregate. I take it up once weather normalizes. I also am a bit OCD when it is six weeks away from our shearing dates, so any dropped hay, whatever, is cleaned up in all pens at that time. So, most of what I am cleaning in the teasing process will be a sandy residual and VM aka vegetable matter. If you deep bed your alpacas during winter and do not clean for six weeks prior to your shearing date, you might not be able to process a fleece as I am describing.
As I go through a fleece, I take a section at a time for processing. Here is a good-sized section that I pulled out the other day. While I did not take pictures of a sample staple, I take about five staples at a single time. You should not be making a Herculean effort to get your staples through the teasing board. I find there is less waste when I tease smaller staples and the benefits are that the staples are about the right size for inserting into your drum carder at one time (see below).
Even though you have assessed staple length, both the process of shearing and other things will cause you to reevaluate consistency of staple. I am talking blanket fleece only here. On neck fiber, while many animals have amazing neck fiber of the same quality as that of the blanket prime fleece, rarely is staple length likely to approach that of the blanket so, were I to be making spinning batts from that fiber, I would make them separately. I prefer to keep shorter staples for making separate batts. In fact when I find perfectly wonderful but shorter staple blanket fiber I separate it out so that my batts are as equivalent in staple length as possible.
So, then, I put the staples through the drum carder. I use a motorized drum carder and my drum has the highest TPI because I only process my finest grades at home. I bought a model for which you can buy lower TPI drums and switch them out with ease, just in case I decide to process a more robust grade. For awhile, I held onto my original hand crank carder thinking I might need it to do a fleece more slowly, but I discovered that the speed dial on my motorized carder can go more slowly than I could ever do by hand crank, so I sold my hand crank drum carder. If you own a drum carder, you probably have heard the wise old adage that you ought to not put any more fiber into the carder at one time unless “you can still read the newspaper through the fiber.” If you are teasing locks in the appropriate amount, even if you have a huge bag of them, they do tend to stay in the teased staple and so, problem solved as to how much to add. I wind up with batts that weigh about three to four ounces. Yes, I would love to upgrade to an extra wide drum carder. A picture of my drum carder is shown in the images.
I have included an image of a single completed batt and a bag full of spinning batts in the images section. Now, I prefer to put a batt through a second pass. So, I rip the batt into maybe five strips so that what is entering is not going to be too much for the carder to handle.
Now, I don’t have a mini-mill and I have tried washing fleeces before (and I will do so if I am doing contract work for other farms), but because most of what I am trying to clean from my fleece is sand, I get it very clean indeed. And let’s face it. When handspinning, we all wash skeins to set the twist. Just provide full disclosure to your customer as to your method. Once they feel your end product, I think they will be more than happy with the result.
So, what are the takeaways from this exercise?
• Appreciation for mill owners whose services you employ. You learn about the great lengths your mill owners go to return to you clean and usable product, even though you skirt it beforehand.
• Fleece anomalies that a six sample initial sort will not provide you. You might discover a tender spot in a fleece and, whether the result of shearing or otherwise, you might find some that staple uniformity is not as perfect as you think.
• Now, if you are a handspinner, take a batt and try spinning. There is nothing better than knowing that your hard work resulted in something you can enjoy turning into yarn!
When I complete this fleece, I expect I will have upwards of 25-30 spinning batts. Now, if you are adept with a dizz, you might be able to dizz your batt off as roving. I just spin directly from a batt but your customers might prefer to spin from roving. And yes, there is a great deal of fleece that winds up on the processing floor, but ask any mill owner about that. Oh, and another thing I learned. I like doing this. I don’t refer to myself as the “control freak fiber artist” without reason! So, I think I will select yet another fleece for this exercise when I am done with Nick’s fleece.
Drum Carder
Section of Raw Fleece
Finished Batt
Bagful of Spinning Batts
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