Script for

Episode 152:

Wool Types - An Introduction

You're listening to the Sheepspot Podcast, a show for hand spinners about making yarns we love. Hi there, welcome to episode two. 

I'm Sasha Torres, I'm a spinner, a spinning teacher, and a dyer. And my fiber company, Sheepspot, offers diverse hand-dyed wool and the information and support you need to make those fibers into beautiful yarns. 

Are you confused about sheep breeds and all the different types of wool they grow? In today's episode, I want to give you a broad overview of the different types of wool that are out there, and to tell you about some of the breeds that fall under each type. 

I'll also tell you why you might choose one type over another when planning a project. In later episodes, we'll take deeper dives into each type and spotlight particular breeds. But for today, my goal is to give you a basic orientation so that when you hear other spinners talk about a particular breed, you'll have some idea where that breed fits into the wonderful world of wool. 

If you're new to this whole types of wool thing, don't worry, I've got you covered. I've made a PDF chart that you can download at www.sheepspot.com slash podcast slash episode two. And it maps out all the different types and their characteristics and uses for you. 

So no note taking is necessary. I want you to have your hands free to spin while you listen. You can just go and download that PDF chart. So first, I want to say a little bit about how I think about wool types. 

I divide wool into six broad categories. And I want to make clear that different spinners may use different categories, they may use fewer categories or more categories. In fact, two books about wool that I use all the time and recommend and love the fleece and fiber source book and the spinners book of wool, both divide up the wool world rather differently than I do. 

And it's also the case that spinners may disagree about where some breeds fit, especially the ones that fall into my last category, which I call the hard to categorize wools. So my own taxonomy is based on three factors, fiber diameter. 

So that's how fine or coarse the average fiber is. Lock structure, the shape that individual locks in the breed's fleeces tend to take, and type of crimp, the natural wave of the wool fibers. So my categories are the ones that make the most sense to me and that I feel give me the best guidance when I'm trying to choose a wool that will give me a particular kind of knitted or woven project, sorry, knitted or woven fabric for a project that I'm planning. 

So here's a list of my categories. Fine wools, medium wools, down and down type wools, long wools, double coated wools, and then my final category, hard to categorize wools. And I'm just going to go through each of these in turn and tell you a little bit about their history, some representative breeds that you may have encountered or may encounter in the future, and what these what I think these wools are best used for. 

So let's start with the fine wools. Even if you're very new to spinning, you're probably familiar with fine wools. The most celebrated of the fine wools is merino. Others include Rambelet, Polworth, Targhee, Rommeldale, and Kormo. 

And those are all wools that have lots of merino wool in their background. For me, the thing that makes a wool a fine wool is that it can be comfortably worn next to the skin by most people. Of course, that's a standard that varies from person to person, and it's a bit of a moving target. 

But I place breeds in this category if their fiber consistently averages under 25 microns in diameter. And a micron is a millionth of a meter. So these breeds, these fine wool breeds, grow fleeces with dense rectangular locks and a very fine, even crimp. 

The fine wool sheep tend to produce a lot of grease, and grease is lanolin and other secretions that the sheep make that protect the fibers while they're still on the sheep and prevent them from felting. 

The fine wools are all highly elastic and soft, but because of their low micron count, they're also quite delicate, and they may not stand up very well to hardware. They're the perfect choice when you're making a project for a baby or to go around your neck, but you wouldn't want to use them to make a carpet. 

They felt easily. And some fine wools I found are more beginner friendly than others. I would recommend starting with Polworth or Targi if you're a newish spinner and you want to experience working with these wools. 

Okay, so on to medium wools. The wools I place in this category are similar to fine wools in their- lock structure. They also tend to have blocky rectangular locks, but they're all a bit coarser in diameter, up to 32 microns. 

They have the same regular crimp as the fine wools, but often you'll find fewer crimps per inch in these breeds, which include Bond, Columbia, Corydale, Finn, Gulf Coast, Ile de France, Polype and Montedale. 

They are a bit less greasy and a bit more sturdy than the fine wools. They're perfect for garments that will be worn over other clothing or on less sensitive parts of the body, and they're good wools for new spinners to experiment with in either mill processed form or as first fleeces when you're learning to process your own wool. 

Thank you. Onto the down and down type wools, and these are probably my absolute favorites. The down wools are named after the Downs along the south coast of England, where many of these breeds originated. 

They include the Dorset Down, Hampshire, Oxford, Pold and Horned Dorset, which are a separate breed than Dorset Down, Shropshire, South Down, and Suffolk. Other breeds, like Black Welsh Mountain, Clun Forest, and Ryland, came from other parts of England, but their wool shares similar characteristics to the classic down breeds, and they're often referred to as down-like breeds. 

These wools tend to have short staples, a staple is the length of a lock, dense blocky locks, and a fine but very irregular crimp that makes them fabulously elastic. They have a crisp hand that I just love, and they tend to be very matte in appearance. 

In terms of fiber diameter, they range from about 24 microns at the finest end to 34 microns at the coarsest end. Many of them are naturally resistant to felting, and the fact that they're so amazingly elastic makes them wonderful for handspun socks, but they're also wonderful sweater yarns. 

And as I believe I mentioned, they are my favorite. I love them. I think they're really underrated, and that's why I just always try to have at least a couple of them available in the shop at all times, so they can be hard to find. 

Next up, the longwools. So the grandfather of the longwool breeds is the Lester longwool, sometimes also called the English Lester. and that's Lester, L-E-I-C-E-S-T-E-R. And the Lester Longwool is the direct descendant of a sheep called the Dishley Longwool. 

And the Dishley Longwool was bred in the late 18th century by Robert Bakewell, who was a British farmer who pioneered many modern breeding practices. The Dishleys actually died out soon after Bakewell's death, but their genetic legacy lives on in the many breeds that we still have that have been developed using Lester Longwool blood. 

So some of the Longwool breeds you may encounter include Blueface Lester, which is the finest of the Longwool breeds, Border Lester, Coopworth, Cotswold, Gotland, Lester Longwool, Lincoln, Parendale, Romney, Teaswater, and Wensleydale. 

And these sheep's wool grows actually in curls, in fine little ringlets for blue-faced luster to long locks up to 15 inches. They grow up to 15 inches of wool in a year on the Lincoln long wool. Their locks are triangular in shape, so they're wide at the cut end and they taper slowly to points at the tip. 

And they have this very distinctive open round crimp pattern. They're also very lustrous and very strong. And their length and their smoothness makes them perfect for worsted spinning, so spinning short forward draw. 

And they make shiny, dense, and very long-wearing yarns. If you're interested in getting started with long wools, I recommend starting with BFL, because that's the softest and it's also the easiest to come by. 

Next up are the multicolored wools. And these breeds are the closest that we have to ancient sheep. They've not been improved by modern agriculture, and I use the word improved in quotation marks, because improving for the standards of modern architecture isn't, agriculture isn't always improving from the perspective of hand spinners. 

But these sheep are, they tend to be small, they tend to have lots of colored fleeces, and they grow two or more kinds of fiber. So they're quite different from the sheep that have been really commercially successful for farmers. 

Those are sheep that tend to be big, they tend to mature quickly, and they tend to grow big fluffy white fleeces. These more primitive sheep, they're little, they're tough, they thrive in really harsh climates, and most of them grow a very soft, warm undercoat next to their skin, and coarse, longer guard hairs that actually help the animals shed moisture. 

So for ancient peoples, these sheep were the sort of perfect package because they provided meat, they provided milk, and they provided the softer undercoat fibers for clothing and the coarser outer coat fibers for things like rope and twine. 

Some of the multi-colored, sorry, multi-coated breeds to look for include Icelandic, Caracol, Navajo Churro, Scottish Blackface, and Shetland. Love Shetlands. Their fleeces and their uses vary a lot from breed to breed and they also vary, can vary quite a bit from fleece to fleece. 

So when I'm working with one of these wools, I try different preparation methods and I spend lots of samples for any individual fleece before I settle on the yarn I'm going to go with. So you might have to be a bit more experimental with these fleeces, especially if you're new to them, but they really do offer wonderful spinning challenges and they will make you better spinners because they're complicated and interesting and also just some beautiful results that you can't get with other kinds of wool. 

Finally, there are the wools that I call hard to categorize and these are the ones that just don't fit neatly into the other categories. For me, these are breeds like California Red, Chevy it, lots of people think of Chevy it as a down like breed, but Chevy it has this wild spiral, spiral crimp that's unique to Chevy it. 

So I kind of don't want to put them in the down category, Jacob, Santa Cruz, Soay and Tunis. And rather than make a lot of generalizations about these breeds that won't be accurate or helpful, I think I'm for now I'm just going to promise that I will talk about them individually in later episodes. 

So just know that they're out there, they're all wonderful in their own ways and they can be a bit hard to come by as processed fiber. But if you're interested in fleeces, they're often available at fiber shows. 

So that about does it for this week. I've crammed in a lot of information. You'll find the show notes for this episode. episode at www.sheepspot.com slash podcast slash episode two. And you can also go there to download your copy of the wool types cheat sheet. 

It's absolutely free. And I'm just gonna give you that URL one more time. It's www.sheepspot.com slash podcast slash episode two. Okay friends, thanks so much for listening. I will see you next week.