How to Wash Your Fleece - Scouring Wool Four Ways

If you have been curious about scouring wool, let’s take a look at four different ways to get out the grease and see what works best!

A pile of off-white, dirty, raw wool sit on a wooden table outside. Behind the wool is a bottle of blue dish soap, a bottle of unicorn power scour, a large plastic container with a lid, and a large stainless steel pot with a lid.

This year, I’ve been lucky enough to go to a few different fiber festivals. The most recent one I attented was the Grazing Hills Fiber Arts Festival in Moscow, Idaho. I drove out of state just to go to this festival with The Claire (my craft bestie/mentor).

We had a great afternoon browsing all the vendors, getting lunch, saying hi to the sheep and alpacas, and buying lots of fiber and yarn. At the end of our shopping, just before we headed home, we decided to take a quick look at the wool fleeces for sale. While this time I stayed strong and didn’t buy an entire fleece, I know that someday it will happen, and I want to be ready when it does.

A white baby alpaca in a field of grass faces the camera, while a brown and white baby alpaca faces away from the camera.

So far, I have mostly spun with prepared fiber, and have never took on the project of preparing raw wool, let alone and entire fleece.

I had never scoured wool before, and honestly, it’s the part of processing wool I’m the most intimidated by. To clean dirty wool, you can’t just throw it in the washing machine! Instead, you have to navigate a balancing act of soap, temperature, and technique to get a fleece free of dirt, grease, vegetable matter (and anything else the sheep might have gotten into) without damaging or felting the wool. There just seems like so many ways it can go wrong.

To get over this hesitation, I decided to jump in and try four different ways to scour wool and see how they compare.

Even though I didn’t buy a raw fleece at the fiber festival (which I might already be regretting), I did have 8 ounces of raw Romney wool (from a sheep named Madelaine) that I bought from Abundant Earth Fiber about five years ago. I bought it with the intention of learning to scour wool and I’m finally ready to give it a try!

Basic Raw Wool Scouring

Most common methods of scouring wool follow this basic process:

Get hot (but not too hot) water
Add soap of choice
Add the dirty wool to the soapy water
Let the wool soak
Rinse off the soap and dirty water
Let the wool dry

Within this outline there are so many variables. How hot should the water be? What kind of soap should you use? Do you presoak the wool? Do you need to use rain water or distilled water for best results?

I didn’t have enough wool to try all of the variables in this experiment. I decided to focus on the soap, and see how much of a difference soap choice makes.

In addition to playing around with this scouring process, I threw the whole thing out the window, and tried suint fermentation as well.

Wool Scouring Technique #1: Hot Water

The first way I attempted to clean my wool was to use hot water only.

Most scouring techniques that I have read involve hot water and some kind of soap. Two of the other techniques will use this basic formula, but I was curious how clean the fleece would get with hot water alone. This serves as a bit of a control for this scouring experiment.

A big part of what makes raw wool feel dirty is the grease from the lanolin. To remove lanolin, you need a water temperature hot enough to melt off of the wool, but not so hot that it burns you or damages the wool.

The first step was to heat up some water to about 170 F, using my wool designated pot that I picked up at a thrift shop. My pot is stainless steel, which should prevent any unwanted reations during scouring. Then, I added some wool and let it soak.

The inside of a stainless steel pot with water and dirty wool inside.

After waiting about 15 minutes (long enough so that the wool had time to soak, but not so long that the water got too cold to wash off the lanolin). I carefully poured off the waste water into my garden. I do not want wool grease or sheep gunk in my plumbing. Then I rinsed off the fleece with fresh water from the hose. It was very hot outside when I was working on this, so the warm water was coming out of the hose. This helped minimize any shock to the wool from temperature changes.

Once the dirty water was rinsed away, I gently squeezed out as much excess water as I could. Then I left my wool out to dry. I don’t have a great wool drying set up yet. A common thing seems to be some sort of frame with a grate to lay the wool on to help it dry quickly. That would be a great set up for a full fleece. For this experiement, I put the wet wool into large lingerie bags, and left them to dry. Mesh bags of any kind would work as well. To keep my wool from blowing away, I put a clean rock on one corner of the bag.

It was a hot enough day that my wool dried in less than 24 hours.

Wool Scouring Technique #2: Dish Soap

My second attempt at wool scouring was to use dish soap. I didn’t get anything specific for this, I just used what I already had in my kitchen. It was already poured into a dispenser, but I think it was Dawn brand.

The hand of a white woman is adding blue dish soap to a large stainless steel pot with hot water.

This followed the same process as using the hot water. The only difference was adding soap to the water before adding the wool. I probably should have measured how much soap I used, but I didn’t. So much for my scientific integrity.

Wool Scouring Technique #3: Unicorn Power Scour

When I was researching scouring techniques, Unicorn Power Scour came up in so many tutorials. It seems to be the go to soap of choice for many spinners, so I had to give it a try.

Just like scouring with the dish soap, I heated up water in my wool pot, added the soap, the wool, and let it soak.

Unicorn power scour soap being added to hot water inside a stainless steel pot.

After about 15 minutes, I rinsed off all the soap, dirt, and grease, and let the wool dry.

Wool Scouring Technique #4: Suint Fermentation

Suint fermentation was the wool scouring method I was most excited to try. I have a science background, with a particular love of microbiology, so this method had me at “fermentation.” I love using bacteria to do work for me!

It doesn’t follow the usual formula of hot water + soap + wool. Instead, it relies on the chemicals, sheep sweat, and bacteria naturally present in the fleece turning into a form of soap and cleaning the fleece with very little work hands on work. If you want to learn more about the science behind this method, I highly recommend you check out this blog post from Blue Barn Fiber.

For this method, you do need a large enough container for your wool, with a lid. What this wool scouring technique lacks in hands on work, it makes up for with smell, so the lid is really important.

Since I wasn’t cleaning a large amount of wool, I used an empty Costco animal cracker container, and it worked great.

A large, clear plastic container with dirty wool floating in it. The water is still clear, but tinged brown.

It is highly recommended to collect rain water to use for this method. Even though I live in the Pacific Northwest, it was summer, and there was not enough rain falling to wash my wool. We don’t have hard water, so I just went for it with some filtered water. I don’t know how big of a difference this made on the final result, but it’s what I had available.

Once you have your container, all you have to do is add wool and water, then leave it in a warm place. I left my wool in the garage (because I didn’t want to stink up the house), for about a week in the middle of summer, so it was definitely warm.

After my wool had soaked in it’s own dirt for about a week, I fished it out. The water had gotten very murky and there was a sort of film on the top of the water.

The same clean plastic container as before, after fermenting for a week. The wool is much cleaner, but the water is murky and brown. A brown film is clinging to the side of the container, at the top of the water line.

With the suint fermentation method, it’s encouraged to reuse save and reuse the fermentation each time you wash wool, to increase the cleaning capabilities with each use.

There was definately an interesting smell when I opened up the container. It honestly wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be, but it was noticeable. A larger amount of wool would probably have a stronger smell. If you are sensitive to strong odors, or live close to other people, you may want to skip this method.

A large stainless steel pot with wool being rinsed. Soapy bubbles have formed at the top of the water.

Once the wool was out of it’s bath, I rinsed it off, just like before. I was excited when I saw soapy bubbles forming when I added fresh water. I took that as a good sign that the suint and bacteria had done their job.

Comparing the Wool

Four sets of scouring wool. With the scouring method labeled on top. From Top left, going clockwise, the methods are hot water, dish soap, unicorn power scour, and suint fermentation.

With all the wool washed and dry I was able to see how the different methods compared. All four methods definitely removed a lot of dirt and grease from the wool.

The hot water only wool had the most visible dirt left behind, but it got cleaner that I thought it would. The Unicorn Power Scour and Suint Fermentation gave the cleanest looking wool, but the dish soap washed wool wasn’t far behind.

Overall, there wasn’t a huge difference between the four methods, just by looking at the wool. To really get a feel for the difference, I needed to spin some yarn!

How Did It Spin Up?

To really understand the difference between the wool scouring methods, I needed to feel it between my fingers.

A set of six hand carded rolags of off-white wool rest on a grey wood table. Behind the rolags a pair of curved hand carders and uncarded wool are visible.

I don’t have wool combs, or a drum carder to process my scoured loose wool. What I did have was a pair of hand carders. So I hand carded rolags and spun a yarn sample out of each batch of wool on my Norwegian spinning wheel. Since I had rolags to work with, I spun all my yarn with a long draw technique and made each sample into a 2-ply yarn.

Hot Water Scoured Yarn

The hot water wool felt the driest while I was spinning. It had almost a crunchy texture. It took a little more work to draft than some of the other wool.

A small skein of two-ply yarn labeled hot water.

The tips of the wool were still quite dirty, but after carding it wasn’t super noticeable.

Dish Soap Soured Yarn

I was a little worried that the dish soap would dry out the wool, but this wool felt nicer than the hot water only wool.

A small skein of two-ply yarn labeled dish soap.

I didn’t have any trouble drafting this wool, and got a nice consistent yarn.

Unicorn Power Scoured Yarn

When I carded this wool, it was so light and fluffy! The Unicorn Power Scour wool was a bit softer than the dish soap wool, and a bit cleaner.

A small skein of two-ply yarn labeled unicorn power scour.

Spinning this wool was the most similar to spinning commercially prepared fiber. It spun the loftiest yarn of all the preparations.

Suint Fermented Yarn

I was so surprised how clean the suin fermented wool turned out. Not only was most of the dirt gone, but the wool was very soft to the touch. Softer than even the Unicorn Power Scoured wool.

A small skein of two-ply yarn labeled suint fermentation.

This wool had the most lanolin left in it, and I could feel it while spinning. I actually really liked spinning in the grease. It made drafting really easy. Even though it left a bit of a greasy feel on my hands, it also made my skin feel very soft.

This was my favorite of the wool preparations to spin. If you have texture sensitives, this may not work as well for you.

Final Thoughts

While there were noticeable differences between the wool and yarn from the different scouring methods, they weren’t as big of a difference as I expected.

I really liked the suint fermentation. Not only is it the easiest method, I liked the wool and yarn it produced best. If I had a particularly greasy fleece, this wouldn’t be the best choice, but otherwise, I could definitely see myself using this technique again, expecially for fine wools.

Four different small skeins of two-ply yarn with the scouring method labeled. Starting from the top left and moving clockwise, the scouring methods are hot water, dish soap, unicorn power scour, and suint fermentation. The dish soap and unicorn power scour yarns are more yellow than the other two yarns.

As for the different soap methods, the Unicorn Power Scour did work a bit better than the dish soap, but it was close enough that I wouldn’t got out to buy more Power Scour. Honestly, just hot water worked pretty well on its own. I would be curious to try other wool wash and wool scouring products to see how they compare to the Unicorn Power Scour.

I hope you give wool scouring a try! It ended up being much easier than I expected.

If you want to see more wool adventures, click here.

What’s your favorite way to scour wool? Let me know in the comments below!