A first go at combing

I have to admit, I just don't know what equipment I own. Having had a rummage in my workroom, I recalled that I had bought a pair of tiny wool combs, single pitch ones (i.e. with only one row of tines) and very small, but nevertheless, they are combs. Here they are:

There's nothing on this photo to give them scale, but they're quite small, especially in comparison to the huge wool combs of the past. But still, they give me an opportunity to try out the technique.

So firstly, I needed to wash some fleece. I know from experience that washing Cotswold fleece can be tricky, but I also know that if one separates the locks beforehand, and lies them in a roasting tin (a roasting tin which, I hasten to add, will never be used for food...!), this is easier. So I use some gentle detergent, and some hand-hot water, then put the tin on the hob on a low heat, and very gently heat for about 20 minutes or so. I then let the water cool down on its own, to about blood temperature, then drain the fleece, and then gently pour on rinse water of about the same temperature. No rubbing, no boiling water to be put onto the fleece, no stirring the water; this way, we hope that we won't get felt. The fleece I used is one I've had for a while - it belonged to Trixie, a Cotswold sheep who is owned by Fiona. It's a nice fleece, and very lustrous and creamy white.

So once the fleece is nice and clean, it needs to be dried, which I did by sticking it over an airer, over the bath, overnight. The next stage seems a little weird. You need to put back some of the grease which has been taken out by the washing. To do this, I spray the fleece locks with a mixture of half-and-half olive oil and water, put into a spray bottle and shaken thoroughly to mix. Now, I know that spinners are divided about whether to wash fleece or not. I never used to do so, but now I nearly always do. Every authority I have consulted about wool combing reckons that it's essential to wash the fleece first, and furthermore that when it was done on a huge scale in the past, clean fleece was always used. In my own experiments, I've realised that if you don't get the fleece fully clean, and then try to create a tightly wound, very fine thread, you will never get that thread clean. I have had some very disappointing yarns which are still quite sticky from having lanolin still on them. As another experiment, I tried combing wool first without the olive oil and water spray, and then with it - and it's sooo much easier with the spray.

So, I have clean, dry, and now sprayed-with-olive-oil-and-water fleece. The next thing to do is to set the combs up. I think these combs are designed to be hand held, but I decided to put one of them into a vice, and clamp it to the table. This was after I nearly did myself a mischief with the tines - they are very sharp.
The next thing to do is to load some locks onto the comb. With the big combs, you can apparently load them to half the depth of the tines, but that is far too much for these little ones. I put two layers of locks onto the comb held in the vice.

You then rotate the comb through 90 degrees, so the teeth point to the right (for right-handers - for left handers I should think it'd be more convenient to have them pointing the other way). The second comb then comes into play. I have to confess at this point that I was taking these photos on my own, and wielding a comb with one hand and a camera with the other was Not Easy. So I'll have to describe what happens. The comb in your hand describes a sort of circular motion, from above to below. The tines just tickle the ends of the locks on the way past, at least to start off with. Some fleece will transfer from the fixed comb to the one in your hand. This is what we want to have happen. You carry on with this combing until most of the fleece on the fixed comb has gone onto the one in your hand. Then, you change the motion of the hand held comb. Instead of going in a circular motion from above to below, it swings from right to left, transferring the fleece back onto the fixed comb.

Eventually, you'll be left with a wild, combed out mass of fleece on your fixed comb, thus:

and a mess of little noils and short bits on the comb in your hand, thus (which you discard, or else keep for carding):


The next bit definitely needed two hands. Rotate the comb in the vice so that its teeth are pointing upwards again. Then, form the mass of fibre on it into a sort of goatee beard shape, and you'll find that you can slowly draw off a continuous stream of fibre; this is called a sliver. Don't take any short pieces of fibre, or indeed any bits with nasty noily bits in. You can then 'plank' the sliver, which is where you lie a couple of feet of it onto a table, break that piece off, and then lie another piece on top of it, breaking that off, and repeating until you have something like this:

You then load it back onto the fixed comb, and go through the combing process again. This won't take quite so long. I think that, if you were using combs with more than one row of tines, this process would remove even more of the short fibres - the point of this exercise is to only use the long ones, and to get them all going in the same direction. I found it's all pretty flyaway at this point, and getting it to stay on the comb was a bit of a challenge at times.

So, the next process is to get that mass of fibre off there, and for this you need a diz. Now, I am not a great one for making equipment, but I did make my own diz - it's the bottom of a plastic bottle, with a hole punched into it. The piece of plastic I used is concave - this is important. Here's the diz:


Now, you rotate the fixed comb back so that its tines are pointing upwards, and you create the little goatee beard sorta thang.


Then, poke the point of the goatee beard through the hole in the centre of the diz - with the concave side pointing away from you, so it is as if the diz becomes a funnel. You can then draw off a continuous stream of fibre again, in a controlled manner. This is really hard to describe, and I suggest that if you want to see this done, you should try searching on YouTube - there are several really good videos of this being done.
Not a terribly clear picture, but never mind.

Once you've removed most of the fibre (and again, don't worry about the horrible short noily bits, leave them on the comb), you have a thing called a top. You can then wind it into a bird's nest sort of arrangement, and put it to one side for spinning.

Now, I've got to say at this point that I worked all this out by using Peter Teal's book, which I mentioned in my last post (and in fact it's the definitive work, if you're interested in wool combing it's definitely worth getting hold of) and the instructional videos I found on the internet. So, I'm no expert, but I have to say that this wasn't difficult to do. I think you need to have a bit of a feel for what the wool is going to do, especially when you are making the sliver or the top, but that's very like hand spinning, so if you can do that, you can probably do this.

I'll post about the actual spinning in a few days. I have to say, though, that I've really enjoyed this, and I am definitely intending to get some big combs. These little ones are good, but they don't manage very much fibre at one time - the big combs are capable of doing a lot more.