Skirting and Sorting
Next, shorn fleece must be skirted: the manure, suint, sticks, and other trash sticking to the edges of the fleece have to be cut off and the fleece picked over to remove vegetal matter. The fleeces are then sorted by grade and color, marked by producer, and packaged for handling and storage.
Cleaning or Opening
While a good Churro fleece can actually be spun right off the skirting table, most fleeces have to be cleaned and washed. Prior to washing, the fleece must be opened to release dust and open locks of wool for penetration of the scouring agents. This can be done by hand, with several kinds of tools, or mechanically.
Washing
Churro wool can be cleaned with white clay, but the washing method applicable to most wool produced on the Navajo Nation requires hot water and scouring agents to remove the lanolin and dirt. The clean, opened fleece needs to be moved through a series of four hot water baths, of which two contain detergent. The wool must be handled gently and not allowed to cool between baths. It must be squeegied (the water pressed out rather than wrung out) between bath one and two so that most of the dirt and lanolin are left there. Scouring agents are used to remove grease, which inhibits mechanical processing of the wool. A few hand spinners may prefer to leave grease in. Lanolin may be recovered as a by-product. The fleece must be dried.
Carding into Roving
Most spinners prefer working with roving, wool with the fibers carded so they all go the same direction and in soft, thick, rope-like lengths. Carding can be done with hand carders (small boards with teeth attached like a metal hair brush), hand-cranked drum carders (drums covered with the same type of toothed material), or motorized drum carders. Motorized drum carders come in a range of sizes from small carders for home use to larger ones for cottage industry. The larger carders can also produce batts, which are useful for quilting and for felting, as well as roving.
Dyeing
Wool can be dyed at any stage after washing, depending on the needs of the final product, the desires of the spinner/weaver, and the processes to be used. Dyeing requires hot water, and sometimes the wool must sit in the hot water for a day or longer. The wool must then be rinsed. The wastewater requires careful disposal according to manufacturer’s recommendations and the condition of the local wastewater system. Dyeing process using natural materials are not benign because they usually depend on mordants.
Spinning
The last stage of processing is spinning the wool into yarn. Spinning can be done with the thigh spindle (traditional Navajo) or a spinning wheel.
