Start with a Fleece You Can Actually Handle

Spinning your own wool is one of those rural skills that looks like witchcraft from the outside and feels like common sense once you have done it a few times. The good news is that you do not need a flock of your own, a fancy wheel or years of practice to make your first usable yarn. A raw fleece, a pair of hand cards and a simple drop spindle will get you further than you would think.

If you are buying in, look for a whole fleece rather than a bag of loose fibre. British breeds behave very differently, and some are far kinder to beginners than others. Shetland, Ryeland, Bluefaced Leicester and Romney all spin reasonably easily, with longish staples and a bit of natural spring. Jacob fleeces are pretty but can be coarse and full of kemp, so leave those until your hands know what they are doing. Expect to pay anywhere from a few pounds for a plain commercial fleece to £30 or more for a prize-winning one at a local show or smallholders' sale.

When the fleece arrives, spread it out on a sheet and skirt it. That means pulling away the daggy bits around the tail, the stained belly wool and any matted edges. You will lose perhaps a quarter of the weight, and that is entirely normal. What is left is the good stuff.

Washing Without Felting

This is where beginners ruin fleeces. Wool felts when it is wet, warm and moving, so the trick is to be generous with water and stingy with handling.

• Fill a bath or large tub with water at roughly 50–60°C. It should feel hot but not scalding to a gloved hand.
• Add a good slug of washing-up liquid or a specialist wool scour. You need enough to cut through the lanolin, which can be 10–20 per cent of the fleece weight.
• Lay handfuls of fleece gently on the surface and press them under. Do not rub, squeeze or swirl.
• Leave for 15–20 minutes, then lift the wool out in nets or baskets and drain the filthy water away.
• Repeat with fresh hot water and soap until the water stays reasonably clear, then do one or two rinses at the same temperature.

Keep every bath the same heat. A sudden cold rinse is the fastest route to a felted brick. Dry the wool on racks or mesh in a warm, airy place, turning it occasionally. It can take two or three days.

Carding: Turning Locks into Spinnable Fibre

Once dry, tease the locks apart with your fingers and pick out any vegetable matter, second cuts or tough tags. Then card. Hand cards are the cheapest option: load a little fibre onto one card, draw the other across it a few times to open and align the fibres, and lift the resulting roll — a rolag — off the card with a gentle stroke.

For a finer, smoother yarn, you can diz the fibre off a drum carder into a long roving, or simply card less and spin from the cloud. Either way, aim for consistency rather than perfection. A pile of soft, airy rolags that feel like candyfloss is exactly what you want.

Drafting Is the Real Skill

Drafting means easing the fibres apart so they slide past one another as they twist. Get this right and everything else falls into place.

• Pre-draft your rolags or roving by stretching them gently to about the thickness of your little finger before you spin.
• Pinch the fibre with your front hand and pull back with your back hand, letting the twist run up only when you release.
• Aim for a yarn about 2–3mm thick to begin with. Finer than that comes later.
• If the yarn keeps snapping, you are drafting too thin. If it will not twist at all, you are holding too much fibre at once.

Practise drafting in your hands without any spindle at all. Ten minutes a day of pulling and sliding fibre will teach your fingers more than an hour of wrestling with equipment.

Your First Drop Spindle

A basic top-whorl drop spindle weighing 30–40g suits most beginners. Tie a leader yarn to the shaft, hook it over the whorl, and spin the spindle clockwise against your thigh to set it turning. Then park it between your knees, draft out a length of fibre, and let the twist travel up to join the leader. This is called park and draft, and it is far easier than trying to do everything at once.

Wind the finished single onto the shaft and carry on. When the spindle is full, wind the yarn into a ball, then ply it back on itself from two balls at once, spinning anticlockwise. Plying balances the yarn, adds strength and hides a multitude of uneven patches.

Finishing, Setting and Using Your Yarn

Wind the plied yarn into a skein around a chair back or niddy noddy, tie it in four places, and wash it gently in warm water. Hang it to dry with a little weight — a clean bottle works well — to set the twist. Snip a short length and let it hang loose: if it kinks up like a spring, it needs more plying twist. If it hangs straight, it is ready.

Your first skeins will be lumpy and full of character. That is fine. They make excellent mittens, hats, hot-water bottle covers and felted slippers, and there is no better feeling than pulling on something you grew, washed, carded and spun with your own hands. Keep the fleece dry, store it with a few lavender bags or cedar blocks against moths, and start watching the sales for next year's fleece.