FAQ - Does your soft shetland wool felt?

I frequently get asked this question, and up until now have not been able to answer because I don't felt.  I now have the answer thanks to a fellow fiber fancier we met at Rhinebeck last year who took one of our fleeces home with her.  She has since posted some very interesting information on her results with felting that she has generously agreed to allow me to share.  In her words on a post in Ravelry:

I bought a whole moorit Shetland fleece from Whispering Pines at Rhinebeck, and finally finished going through the lot of it. It’s low micron (I think the report indicated 22 or 23 micron), and I sent it through my combs and dizzed it into roving. The combing waste is getting spun on my drop spindle, and looking remarkable well for spun yarn from waste fiber.

But since I now have a nice bag of roving, I decided to get my felt swatch before making any decisions. I can spin, but wet felt is my true art form.

OMG, the felt this stuff makes is softer than an angel’s butt. Every bit as soft as Merino, and with every bit (or more) of the drape of Merino too. Where Merino makes kind of a hard, flat surface on the skin of the felt, the Shetland swatch is fuzzy. Not hairy, just lightly fuzzy. And oh-so-soft. Now I’m going to have to make the hard decision as to whether I want to spin this on a wheel, or just make a bunch of delicious felted garments out of it. I am LOVING this stuff.

A side note for other felters: Shetland takes rather more fulling than one would expect. The other Shetland I’ve swatched was a higher micron fiber, so rougher, but behaved exactly as this one did. It gums together into prefelt pretty quickly (a bit longer than Merino takes, but not much longer), but it seems to take bloody forever to finish fulling down. It’s very hard to get it to full completely with nothing more than rolling. My higher-micron swatch needed some time on the glass washboard to get it to full completely. I knew that the surface finish of my low micron swatch wasn’t going to stand up at all to the abuse of the glass washboard, so I finished it by shock fulling in the kitchen sink. This caused the surface to fuzz up a bit more, but was effective in getting it fulled down.

Shrinkage rates are considerably lower than Merino because it doesn’t full as tightly - but the payoff comes with increased drape. I would regard this as a garment-quality felt rather than a utility felt. I will try to get my hands on some of the really rugged end of the Shetland fiber continuum at some point to see if my opinion changes.

Here are the accompanying photos:

Susan - the donor ewe.  Gratuitous adorable baby photo.  Mom is Georgianna.

Susan at 6 mos - fleece is scrunched due to coat which we removed for the photo.

Man that is nice.

Washed

Combed and diz'd

Drop Handspun single of the waste.  Yes you heard me right, this is waste wool.  Wow.

There are additional posts on Ravelry where she further explains felting, fulling etc.  Its on the SE2SE shetland thread if you want to read more.