I told the story in an earlier blog post, about the woman who threw dirty fibre onto her garden to be used as mulch, because she thought it was beyond hope. Only to rediscover it in the spring; white, clean and ready to be carded and spun.
Well it's nearly spring here, as my lovely little flowers above can attest to, so I don't have the long winter months to work with here. But I do have the rains. And boy is it raining. So below is a bit of a photo essay of my experiment with letting the rain have its way -- and cleaning my fibre in the process.
Above are the two samples I'm working with. On the left is very dirty and greasy Jacob, on the right is Cheviot. The cheviot isn't as greasy as the jacob is. But both have not yet been washed and both are local fleeces.
I tucked them into a lingerie bag, cause I don't want to fight with sticks, straw and other unpleasant things when this experiment is over.
Nicely layered and zipped up. Ready to head outside.
It rained all last night so the rain barrel was full. You all know you can't leave a full rain barrel hanging around, so it had to be tipped. Before I did that, I gave the fibre a good soak in the lovely soft rain water.
I decided that it needed a longer soak, so I put a bucket aside for the purpose. Then tipped the barrel. I'm going to let it soak overnight, or maybe over the weekend. After that I'll find a good spot in the garden for it. Somewhere it will get rained on, over and over and over again.
If this works, I'll be one very happy woman.
Stay tuned.
No comments:
Post a Comment