Spinning dog fur - progress report

I've now washed all of the dog fur in Unicorn Power Scour, it is dry and no longer smells of dog!  I took some photos of the fibre at different stages to show you how it balls up during washing:

Strange isn't it?   No other fibre I've worked with behaved like this.

Here's the fibre after I pulled the balls apart:

The fibre didn't felt at all and the balls came apart easily.

Once the fibre was dry, I ran it through my Ashford drum carder.  The drum carder has two spiked rollers, or drums, the small drum feeds the fibre onto the larger drum, the fibre is not supposed to get tangled on the small feeder  drum.  No matter what I did, the dog fur embedded itself into the teeth of the small drum and didn't transfer very well, as you can see in the picture below.  The drum carder is supposed to take 65g of fibre but the most dog fur I managed to get onto the main drum in one go was about 2g.  As you can imagine, carding this fur is a slow process!  

After struggling for a bit, I had a brain wave.  I originally bought my drum carder when I was working on a commission to spin a pet rabbit's fur.  Rabbit fur is one of the finest fibres you can spin.  The salesperson assured me a packer brush would help.  A packer brush is a bit like those draught excluders you put in the letterbox, it's a lot of soft bristles close together.  The packer brush is detachable, when fitted to the drum carder, its job is to push the fibre into the teeth of the large drum.  Here is a close up picture of the fitted packer brush:

The packer brush worked really well, I got 8g onto the drum instead of 2g! 


After carding the fibre I made rolags, since the dog fur doesn't hold together very well I rolled the fibre into rolags as I pulled it off the drum.  Here are two rolags of husky fur, they weigh between 1g and 2g each.

Here is a close up of the rolag, you can see the shorter darker guard hairs mixed in with the fluffy undercoat:

I spun two singles using the long draw technique.  This fibre is so unforgiving.  Wool pretty much spins itself, you can watch TV and spin no problem, but the dog fur needs full concentration, it untwists at any opportunity and the first single I spun broke frequently.  Here's the first bobbin: 

This yarn is a celebration of a much loved pet so I am spinning the fur as it comes rather than picking out all the odd hairs.  The fibre does vary, there are some coarser fibres even among the undercoat and there are patches which are full of very short black hair.  If I wanted the softest yarn possible I would need to pick these bits out, however, the aim of the project is to make a yarn which is true to Alaska the dog, so I am leaving in all but the coarsest fibres.

Plying is a fiddly job.  You need a lot of twist in the singles to keep the fibre together, also the yarn is slubbed with thicker and thinner places so when I ply the singles it is a difficult job to produce a balanced yarn.  The thinner parts of the singles have more twist than the slubs and thicker parts so I have to work at the plying to even out the twist.  However, I am proud to say the two skeins I have finished are well balanced yarns.  You can tell if a skein is balanced or not when you take it off the bobbin and let the skein hang, if the skein twists on itself it is not balanced, if it hangs in an open loop then you have a balanced yarn!  

Here is the first completed skein:

 
I have now completed two skeins and I feel like I'm getting the mastery of this unusual fibre.  Now all I've got to do is spin that pillow case full of remaining dog fur! 

To see more of my work and to buy handspun yarns please visit my online shop:

www.shearersgirlyarns.co.uk 

How does spinning work?

I think it's time to explain some of the terms I've been rattling on about (and will rattle on about in the future).  Let's follow the whole process.  First, part your fibre from the animal, this is either done by shearing or plucking, depending on the creature.  Originally, sheep shed their fleeces themselves, much as a dog molts.  However, wool used to be extremely valuable and people found it inconvenient to have to pick their wool out of the hedge so over years we bred the ability to shed their fleece out of sheep.  This is why sheep have to be shorn, we humans have made sheep dependent on us.  Alpacas and angora goats have the same problem, they also have to be shorn.  Angora rabbits however do molt and can either be plucked when their coat is being shed naturally or they can be shorn.  The best time to sort fibre is as it comes off the animal, this is the only time you can be sure which bit of the animal the fibre came from.  Fibre quality varies depending on where it grew, and who wants to wear an animal's pubes anyway?

Once the fibre has been harvested and sorted, as a handspinner I have two choices, to wash the fibre first or to spin 'in the grease' and wash the completed yarn.  I usually spin alpaca in it's raw state as alpaca is not very greasy and can become matted during washing.  Angora goats smell terribly so I always wash mohair (mohair fibre comes from the angora goat, angora fibre grows on angora rabbits - confusing).  With wool it depends on the project and the fleece, I have some very short eight week old lambswool I'm spinning in the grease because I reasoned the lambs couldn't have got that dirty in eight weeks and I was worried about washing the fibre.  Saying that, I've helped out at lambing time and the amount of blood, birth fluid and mum's saliva lambs are drenched in the wool is probably far from clean!      

The next step is to card or comb the fibre.  Carding and combing are two different processes, carding is usually best for shorter fibres while combing is only suitable for long strong fibres.  I have never used hand combs (it's an ambition of mine to learn to use them) so I will concentrate on carding.  Carding can be done with hand carders or a drum carder.  Basically a carder is a surface covered in teeth , rather like a fierce hairbrush, which separates out the fibres.  Yarns insulate by trapping air between the fibres, carding helps to introduce air prior to spinning.  

Technically there are two types of spinning: woollen and worsted.  There are different processes for making a woollen yarn and a worsted yarn.  However many handspinners, myself included, produce yarn which is a hybrid, not a true woollen or true worsted.  A true woollen yarn is made from shorter fibres which are carded not combed and spun from a rolag using the long draw technique.  A worsted yarn is made from long fibres which are combed and spun using short draw.  I may mix these techniques up so I might card the fibre then spin short draw, for instance.  A rolag is made when you remove the fibre from the carders and roll the fibre into a tube then spin from the tube.  Rolags are generally spun long draw, in long draw spinning the fibres lay at right angles to the direction of the yarn, with short draw, the fibres lie parallel with the direction of the yarn.  Woollen spun yarns contain more air and tend to have a fluffier finish, yarns which have been spun using short draw contain less air but tend to be stronger.  A true worsted yarn will be smooth and strong with a good lustre.

To create a yarn, you can spin a single strand or ply several strands together.  Plying makes the yarn stronger  and creates a balanced yarn which will not distort the garment when knitted.  A single yarn can be inclined to twist up on itself, therefore the danger is it will pull any garment made from it out of shape.   

When the yarn is finished, it is best to wash the yarn to set the twist, washing helps to stabilise the yarn.  I hang up the skein dripping wet, the weight of the water helps to remove any kinks.

I hope this brief explanation of spinning makes sense.  Having written this, I think it is much easier to spin than to explain how it's done!  Do ask questions if there is anything you would like to know more about.