From Raw Fleece to Pattern-Page Feature: My Rustic Tea Cozy

 

(C) Olwen White

Hi all

Last year I had a go at processing raw sheep fleece. By that I mean, unwashed fleece straight off the sheep’s back. Still pretty much intact, complete with bits of straw, grass, bramble, and other debris that sheep tend to roll in. So my first job was to pick out as much of that jumble of vegetation and manure as I could.

By hand… and yes, it was as icky as it sounds!

Step 1 - Washing and Drying the Fleece

For my first fleece, I used warm water and some Woolite. You can use a special scouring soap like Unicorn Power Scour, but I didn’t have any. I would have used hot water, but as I was processing the fleece outside, I couldn’t get it any hotter than warm. The camping stove I was using couldn’t cope with the sheer volume of water needed to wash a fleece.

Besides, if the water is too hot you can felt the fleece rather than clean it, so I figured warm would be safer. I mean wool is usually washed in cold water, right? So warm should be fine… you might want to hold on to that thought.

Next, I left the fleece in the water for a few hours. Making sure to push the fleece under the surface every so often and swirl it around a bit to make sure the soap got into all the nooks and crannies.

I ended up giving the fleece two washes. For the next wash, I used cold water. Simply because I really didn’t want to try and heat any more water on the camping stove. 

(C) Olwen White

The fleece turned out OK. It still had quite a bit of lanolin left in it, mainly because I didn’t wash it hot enough to melt it. But overall, it was cleaner than when it went in. I wasn’t too worried about the lanolin. Years ago, folks processing wool would have left most of the lanolin in. This is known as ‘the grease’. They would have spun the yarn in the grease. In some areas, they even knitted in the grease. Especially fishermen’s jumpers (sweaters) because the lanolin made them water resistant.

The jumpers. Not the fishermen… although considering the rough seas and rain they have to put up with, I’m sure the fishermen would have liked as much water proofing as they could get. :D

Taking a raw fleece and turning it into yarn is a lengthy, water-intensive process. It’s also hard work. A wet fleece can be heavy. So I was overjoyed when I could finally stop lifting it out of the wash water, into rinse water, then more rinse water, and yet more rinse water. The water has to run clear, or at least clear-ish.

The next step was easy! It was a case of leaving the fleece out in the sun to dry. That took the best part of a week. 

Step 2 - Picking More Debris From the Fleece 

I’d been looking forward to trying out this gadget. It’s a picker and it makes short work of turning a tangled lump of sheep’s wool into something that is light and fluffy. 

(C) Olwen White

 

Again, the workout this gives your arms beats lifting weights at the gym! But it's well worth the effort.

(C) Olwen white

 

Step 3 - Carding the Floof

Next, I needed to take the floof and turn it into something I could spin. Some people can spin from floof but I’m not at that stage yet. So I had to make some batts using a drum carder. A batt is basically a flat, oblong, wadge of wool.

(C) Olwen White

Step 4 - Spinning the Batts

Spinning the batts into yarn was sticky to say the least. It was at this point that I started to re-think my life choices about the lanolin. The fiber kept sticking to my hands and gumming up my fingers. So much so that I couldn’t let go of the stuff as the wheel pulled it on to the bobbin. This meant that I couldn’t get a consistent yarn. It was thick, thin, and every size in between. 

(C) Olwen White

 

The next stage involved yet more water. It’s important to wash the spun yarn after spinning so that it ‘sets’ the spin. An added advantage is – it gets more of the lanolin out.

Step 5 - Dyeing the Yarn

Up until this point the yarn was its natural color of slightly off-white. I had read somewhere that nettles make a nice green color and as we have an abundance of the plant, I collected some. It was late summer 2025 at this point. That fact is important – hold on to it.

Collecting the nettles proved to be a painful experience. They got me on my arms, hands, legs, and even my forehead… I was leaning down to get the bottom leaves and forgot the plants had leaves up top. The nettles here are particularly vicious and take no prisoners!

I popped the nettles and the yarn in a pot of water to gently simmer for a while.

You remember I asked you to hold on to the fact that it was summer 2025? Well it turns out nettles can give different colors depending on the time you pick them. It was late in the season, the nettles were old. So my yarn came out more of a moss green verging on brown rather than the nice vibrant green I was expecting.

With disappointment running high, I shelved this project. Until late spring 2026 when I once again collected nettles. Only this time I remembered to wear gloves and snipped the leaves off with clippers. It’s less painful that way.

I even managed to spin some more of the batts into yarn. A slightly more even yarn with fewer thick sections. 

(C) Olwen White

 

This time my dye pot contained, freshly picked nettles and some mordant. The mordant was made from Alum and Cream of Tartar. Adding a mordant helps to set the color and stop it washing out quite so easily at a later date.

When the yarn came out, it was a nicer shade of yellow-green. Still not the vibrant Lincoln green of my dreams. But at least it was green. 

Step 6 - Finding a Pattern

After all of this hard work, I needed a project for the yellow-green yarn. So I went to Ravelry to find a suitable pattern. I found a really nice tea cozy pattern and thought… Perfect! There was just one problem.

I didn’t have enough yellow-green yarn and as it was now June 2026. If I picked more nettles to dye more yarn, I’d get a different color. It would be like having different dye lots on commercial yarn. So I decided to get creative. By combining the moss green-brown yarn from late summer 2025 with the yarn from Spring 2026, I could get a stripy tea cozy.

So that’s what I did. Only, it turns out I was a bit short on the moss green too. So the top of the tea cozy is the yarn in its natural shade. 

Meet The Time Traveling Tea Cozy

This tea cozy tells two stories of how time changes everything. The first, the difference in dye color that can be achieved depending on when you pick your nettles.

(C) Olwen White

 

The second – the moss green yarn was spun first. Then I spun the yellow-green. Lastly, I spun the white yarn. At each stage you can see how the spinning has become more even, more uniform. So it’s a record of how much my spinning has improved since late summer 2025. 

(C) Olwen White

 

What a difference a year makes!

Getting Noticed on Ravelry

I uploaded it to Ravelry and linked it to the pattern. More as a record to show how my spinning, crochet, and knitting has improved since I first joined Ravelry way back in 2010.

If you are interested in seeing my projects on Ravelry, you can follow me here:

https://www.ravelry.com/projects/OllyW

Now don’t get me wrong, it was a challenge to knit. Not because of the pattern. The pattern was great. Easy to follow and well written. The challenge was knitting with the yarn. It’s so uneven. It goes so thin in places it almost disappears. In hindsight, I should have plied it for more stability. But I entered the tea cozy into the local fair anyway and it won a blue ribbon. 

(C) Olwen White

 

You could have knocked me over with a feather when the designer got in touch with me via Ravelry. She left a comment to say she loved everything about the tea cozy. So much so, she asked for permission to use the picture on her pattern page. That accolade has meant more to me than the blue ribbon I won at the local fair. I’m tickled pink! Thanks so much to Tina at Tina’s Allsorts, the designer of the tea cozy pattern.

You can find the pattern here: https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/tea-cosie-lining in case you want to make your own tea cozy.

This tea cozy is my pride and joy. It’s a little uneven, there are bulky stitches in places where the spun yarn was too thick. I’m too scared to wash it in case the nettle dye washes out. And you could say it’s a little bit… rustic and incredibly rough around the edges. But, it has a quirky appeal that just makes me smile.

I hope this blog post has made you smile! Have you ever worked on a project that ended up being more of a challenge than you expected? Let me know in the comments.

Thanks for reading, I’ll catch you next time!

Bye for now

Olly

 

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