If you use World of Wool regularly, you might have noticed that they’ve added some raw wool breeds to their naturals selection recently. I bought a couple last time I did an order, Blackface, and Radnor. They looked a lot like the photos.

I picked out all the locks first, and made a few piles of loose bits: a pile the same quality as the locks, a pile for surface texture and a pile for adding texture between layers.

The Blackface had quite a few different parts, longer straighter locks and some shorter and curly, and some wiry black parts – these went out for the birds – there was a clump which was really dirty and this went out for the birds too after a soak. I picked out some nice locks to keep raw:

I washed the rest, just a handful at a time, dipping them in soapy (anti dandruff shampoo) water to get rid of most of the dirt, then rubbing any dirty bits with shampoo, then rinsing. Here are some washed Blackface locks:

Here are a few more:

I forgot to take photos of the washed loose Blackface, but for this and the loose Radnor, I washed it a bit differently. I ran a bucket of water and poured some into a tub to put the loose fibre for a few minutes to get the main dirt off; I poured some into a tub with shampoo to leave it to soak, and poured some in a tub to cool down at the same rate for rinsing. This is the (nicest bits ) loose Radnor after washing and drying:

I’ll probably card that and the Balckface. I sorted and separated the Radnor the same as the Blackface, this is the raw Radnor:

There were differences in some of the locks, some being a lot more crimpy. Here are some of the washed and dried locks:

A close up of the crimp, you can see there are bits of VM in there. It doesn’t bother me too much because I don’t mind a bit of VM on my natural hangings and the tiny bits will flick out if I comb the locks through my handcarders.:

I did get some other raw wool recently, I couldn’t resist when I saw it on Facebook for £1 per 100g, beautiful Portland wool, here are some locks:

I didn’t pick or sort them either, that’s how they came. I got them from Nancy from Nancy’s Fibres, if you’re lucky she might have some left. And just to add a bit of colour, here’s the small sample I made at the well being centre last week when we tried out fabric strips (yep, the second one is yet another charity shop scarf!):

And an angled photo of the texture:

The third strip down is silk taffeta, which I did a post about a while ago: https://feltingandfiberstudio.com/2015/01/23/silk-nuno-samples/