Icelandic Wool

This is the yarn I’ve managed to make from two Icelandic sheep’s fleeces. One of the fleeces, a beautiful multicolored one, was smallish. The other, a white one, was probably average size for Icelandic. 

I separated the tog (the longer, stronger outer coat) from the thel (the shorter, finer inner coat). I got about 1,100 yards of tog and about 1,800 yards of thel, both spun into a fine, two-ply yarn. My intentions from the beginning have been to weave with the yarn. I also have 300-500 yards of thicker, combined tog + thel yarn that I spun from fiber left behind in the combs after combing the thel, plus other combined remnants. I won’t use the combined yarn in the cloth I’ll be weaving with the separated yarn.

What I’ve learned so far is in order to  make cloth with Icelandic wool, you need many fleeces for just one project, say enough cloth for a dress. My two fleeces will not make enough cloth for me, but maybe there will be enough for a baby outfit for my little granddaughter. I wove a small test swatch and discovered that fulling drastically reduces the size, more than other wools I’ve woven with. The width reduced by 42%  and the length by 27%. I have estimated that after fulling the cloth woven at 30 inches by 72 inches I will have a piece of fine wool cloth approximately 17 inches wide and 52 inches long. 

I read somewhere that traditionally, the household had to present new clothing to everyone in the house (including workers and slaves) by Solstice or Yule or thereabouts, or else you’d get coal in your stocking (lol, not really, but it the equivalent to that) and you would probably be looked upon as lazy. Well, if you were producing that much cloth and clothing every year, you certainly weren’t lazy. That on top of all the cloth produced to sell and trade - after all, vadmal cloth was the backbone of the Icelandic economy.

So what I’ve learned so far is it had to take a lot of sheep and a lot of work to keep everyone clothed and to produce enough cloth to keep the economy thriving. Everyone must have been spinning in every spare moment.