Fleecey Fleeceness

This past week I have been told more than once that my life would in fact be a great sitcom. Depending on which person was telling me this the only debate was which network would be more appropriate; Fox, HBO or maybe Showtime. At least I bring my friends joy, right? Yeah, that. We are still waiting on MGH to call back. How long are these things supposed to take? How many days do you wait before calling again? Is there some sort of etiquette involved with these things? I don't want to be pushy, maybe if I sent an edible arrangement with a card attached; This is not a bribe but I'd love to hear from you? And while I don't to be pushy I need answers, Mr. Bunny is getting worse and it is affecting our family. If I were to be honest and not hide behind the jokes I make about everything inappropriate I might tell you I'm scared. I'm really, really scared. But I don't admit such things so instead, we'll check in on our fleecey experiment.

Remember we were going to try the old school fleece cleaning method?

Well this is what we started with, our free mystery fleece. Because we are a beginner all we know it definitely smells like sheep and it is soft, super exceptionally soft when it is clean. So here is our fleece on tulle.





Here are three tulle layers of fleece in our container we already prepared with ten gallons of distilled water. You are supposed to use rain water but I don't have a "proper" collection area and just leaving an open container outside in the middle of the wetlands seems like some sort of open invitation to a mosquito gala with cheap drink, and ample place to lay eggs. Not what I wanted at all so my well water is very hard so I decided to go with distilled. This gets covered and sat out for 9 days, two extra because of the rain.


After nine days, I opened it up. Woo, it smells like a sheep farm a concentrated sheep farm. It's a very strong smell, very.very.very strong. I would not do this unless there is space between you and your neighbors, it lingers. I felt SO bad for mine because even though we have a little over an acre one neighbor is really close. I don't have a picture of it when I pulled it out but goodness it was rank. Much cleaner looking but stinky. The bottom of this fleece is still filled with vegetable matter and I might do a hot water wash to see if there is maybe some extra lanolin helping it cling on. You could absolutely see bubbles when pulling the fleece out of the container and rinsing so it did make it's own little stinky soap.


I then laid it out on this table Mr. Bunny made for me. Funny story attached to this, Mr. Bunny went into the woods to see if one of the fallen trees would work for legs. Instead he found scrap wood the old owners must of tossed back there. It was in good shape, he cut off the bad bits and used that. This table cost a mere five dollars because it was all scrap and hardware cloth. I love it. Anyway I put the very stinky fleece on here, to rinse and to dry with my ghetto fabulous broken screen and rocks on top to keep the bugs out. So this morning I started my coffee and went to go outside and the skies opened up and started pouring. My fleece which was hanging in lingerie bags (I had just put them in those last night to dry a bit more before I brought them in) on the edge of table to come in. I am going to call it another rinse. In the mean time I had another fleece in my suint mix for two days and tossed it on top of the table and let the rain rinse it. Maybe then my neighbor won't have to deal with the barn smell. I'm hoping this cleans it well and the smell dissipates. So I can't tell you the final result yet, but when it stops raining and dries I will report back.

Waahhh, I just want to dye it and needle felt!!!!!