The Power of Sorting

Hello everyone, today we are discussing one of the more hands-on aspects of the wool side of our business: hand sorting. This is physically sorting each fleece into different grades for its intended final use.

If a fleece is not sorted and split into its different grades and then the wool is used for making knitting yarn you will end up with an inconsistent yarn – it will be thick and thin and may break easily. This is because there has not been uniformity in the wool.

You can see how different it can be in the examples above – these samples both come from the same fleece, the fine soft yarn on the left and the much rougher wool on the right containing the longer guard hair. This guard hair can be and is combed out but if it goes into yarn along with the finer wool it becomes an irritant and changes the balance of the wool.

We grade and sort into 5 grades 1 being the finest. Within the same fleece you can find all five grades, we recently filmed a video about preparing a fleece for shows here in Shetland but the information might also be helpful here:

So for an example the boys in the Woolstore took a typical Shetland fleece we would receive and we laid it out..

We then sorted it and removed all the rougher grades….

Leaving behind what we keep for knitting yarns, you can see how much is removed…

From a 1.5kg fleece we were left with:

• Off Sorts, not for knitting yarn: 800g
• Finer wool for yarn: 700g

So in that fleece there was more to be removed than was kept for yarn. None of the yarn not suitable for hand knitting yarn is wasted, our parent company Curtis Wool Direct is able to either comb (to remove a lot of the longer guard hair) and use in a Worsted Spun Yarn or clean (dirty, heavily soiled or full of vegetable matter) to be used in carpet or even wool insulation products.

Neckband wool, you can see how fine and high quality the wool is but due to its location, there is a lot of vegetable matter! We sort the neckbands on their own and keep them all together so once cleaned this wool can be used for yarn.

For our woollen spun yarns like 2ply Jumper Weight to name one this sorting process is extremely important, even in a fine fleece you can get areas with both a long and short staple which is why grading alone is not enough.

Due to the volume of wool we take in we are able to be more discerning with our sorting to ensure only the best graded and sorted Shetland Wool is used for our knitting yarns, because of this volume we are unable to sort it all here on-site but once it gets to Curtis Wool Direct what’s not is sorted and the wool for knitting yarns goes into our ‘Wool Bank’ which we then create our yarns from. During the winter and quieter months, we also sort here alongside our everyday grading.

We have had a busy summer here in Shetland, the wool season is fully underway and we had the Tall Ships Race in Lerwick last week, if you want to keep up with what’s happening at J&S be sure to sign up to our newsletter, Happy Knitting!