The Field Guide to Fleece - Book Review
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This post was last edited/updated in March 2021.
The book I wanted to review today actually was recommended to me by Marie Spaulding of Living Felt, and now I'm recommending it to you. It also has nothing and everything to do with felting, but if you enjoy working with wool in any capacity, you'll want to get either this book, The Field Guide to Fleece, or its big sister The Fleece & Fiber Sourcebook (for which I will write a separate book review) or both. They're actually both put together by the same authors, but the field guide is much smaller, something you'd be likely to bring with you to a fiber festival. It is also apparently about 100 breeds shorter, which sounds like a lot until you realize the field guide itself has 100 sheep breeds. The larger book contains other fiber-producing animals, not just sheep, while the Field Guide focuses on sheep only.
A little backstory: when I first started felting, I honestly thought there were only like 20 or so sheep breeds for producing fiber. Actually, maybe less than that initially. If you think about it, the only named breeds you might find while shopping for fiber for felting would be Corriedale, or Merino, or Romney. It also took me a while to realize that angora typically comes from bunnies, and that cashmere is from a goat, not a sheep. That fancy cashmere sweater isn’t technically wool, at least not sheep’s wool - it depends on how you define “wool.” Then I purchased The Complete Photo Guide to Felting (you can read my review here), and the samples in that book included quite a few more sheep breeds, ones I'd never heard of. I thought "Great! Now I have a more comprehensive list of fleece to look for!" Little did I know that even that list just barely scraped the surface.
Truth be told, the field guide to fleece really is like a popular "breeds books" you often see for other animals like cats or dogs or horses, except instead of focusing on the animal's temperament, it's focusing on the fleece produced by them. Each breed takes up a spread. On the left you have a one-to-two-paragraph write up, how well it takes dyes, how it's best used (even felters are occasionally mentioned, though not as often as you'd think, just on the popular ones we already know), and a photo of the sheep. By the way, that’s something I have on my long-term-list-of-projects, to see how each breed performs for needle felting specifically - usually any mention of “felting” refers to wet felting, and some breeds aren’t really good for that. On the right, you have a picture of one of the locks next to a ruler, a quick guide including origin, fleece weights (how much you could expect from a single sheep), staple length (average length of locks), fiber diameters (those are your micron counts), natural colors and a section for you to add your field notes. There's also a little interesting factoid at the bottom right of the page.
The reason I italicized and bolded how well it takes dyes is because I had no idea that different breeds of sheep take dyes differently. The thing is (oh this is so cool) wool can differ greatly even on the same sheep! You see, the fleeces we most often have readily available for felting come from single-coated sheep. That means the wool is all pretty much standard and consistent all over. However, just like dog breeds can have single and double coats, certain breeds of sheep also have double coats - this is very common on old heritage breeds, like Racka, which I shared a bit about here. And, of course, I got to experiment with my first double coated sheep when I purchased the Icelandic fleece at the first fleece festival I ever went to (more on that in a bit). In any case, a fleece might have hair, wool and also something called kemp. The hair is the long, straight stuff, the wool is what most of the fiber is like, and the kemp is (typically) short and brittle and hollow. The hollow fibers suck up dye without changing much at all. Spinning this half-dyed fleece would be a way to get tweed yarn. Another thing to note is that the overcoat is coarser (larger fiber diameter) than the undercoat, which can be soft and quite fine. When you process your own fleece, you always have the choice of separating the coats or just using them together as is, depending on your needs.
Clun Forest is one of my absolute favorite breeds for needle felting so far.
If you enjoy wet felting, make sure you read the descriptions, because apparently not all fleeces will felt - from my understanding, mentions of "does not felt" pertains to wet felting/fulling, as in whether or not you can get a good felt out of it, or if a sweater from it will shrink (good to know if you can throw that sweater in the dryer). Needle felting isn't as much of an issue, since we use needles to tangle the fibers together. Our options for needle felting are far greater than wet felting. Even poly-fill will "felt" even though you can't wet felt with it.
As a needle felter, you will want to pay attention to the fiber diameters. Anything in the 25-40 micron range should feel pretty similar to what you've used thus far. A few breeds have micron counts below 25 (like Spaelsau, Santa Cruz, Rambouillet) which would be similar to Merino. Since most breeds seem to be within that "coarser" range, they should be fairly easy to needle felt.
At first I wasn't sure what to do with the "field notes" section. The book suggests that you can write down the names of farms/suppliers as you go out and meet them; however if you do most of your shopping online in destash/discount groups or ebay (ebay is a great place to get fiber) and just grab whatever you need, I would think that it would have limited use. That is, until I picked up that Icelandic fleece at the fiber festival...
Those dandruffy looking flakes are scurf.
Now, I want to talk about something that isn't mentioned in the book, isn't really talked about online, and left me cursing under my breath quite a bit. SCURF. That is some really annoying. It's like dandruff, but worse, because it's created by mites and nearly impossible to get out of the fleece. You can't scrub it out, can't card it out, and can't really pick it out. The only thing I read that really works is going over the fleece with a lice comb or using ammonia when washing the fleece. I may try that, but I absolutely can't stand the smell of ammonia so we'll see. Imagine my horror when I was washing this fleece and these annoyingly stubborn specks just glowed at me from the dirty water. After some searching, I learned that Icelandic fleece can be scurfy, which I assume means that I'm not the only one who's had this problem. So I noted that in my field guide. Still, it is an otherwise beautiful fleece, and not all of the fiber is plagued with it, so... I'm just taking a deep breath and dealing with it. I am NOT faulting the shepherd, because apparently itch mites are difficult to spot so they would not necessarily know until after the fact; however I spotted it on the fleece prior to washing it, and I know that they divided it up because, thanks to The Field Guide to Fleece, I know the Icelandic sheep yield 4-7 lbs and these were split up into 1-2lb bags and skirted. So I guess it depends on how closely one looks at the fiber. Some fiber artists don’t mind working with it, and they need to earn a living - they could’ve discounted the bags or given a heads-up though.
Also, worth noting - absolutely look at the fleeces before buying. Don’t feel shy (like I did) and just grab-and-go.
How this can be helpful to us needle felters: if you like to work with locks and want to know which locks are worth looking for. That’s why the book was recommended to me - it was during a discussion on finding good breeds for the types of locks that I need.
Here are the things I wish they'd added to the book. First, a quick reference chart with just the stats (weights, staple lengths, micron counts, etc) would be AWESOME. I may end up making an excel sheet based off that info, as it's much easier than skimming through the book. Second, if this book is meant to help guide fiber enthusiasts on buying fleeces, maybe a quick guide on how to pick a good fleece - like a checklist of what to look for? And, on that note, reasons you might want to pass up a fleece. Like scurf. I know it's not fun to talk about, but spending our hard-earned dollars on a fleece that is more work than it's worth is not exactly a fun thing. Either way, I do recommend getting this book at least to start, and if you do plan to work with fleece to a greater extent, the big book too.
