Lock by Lock

I was lurking in the Fiber Prep group the other day when I read the advice someone was giving someone else about washing Cormo. Whenever I see the word Cormo in a thread I click on it because I still have several bags of the incredibly greasy stuff in the shed from my washing disaster during the Tour de Fleece back in 2010. Clean Cormo is the best thing ever, but getting it clean without ruining the fiber is near impossible.

 

The person giving the advice was saying to wash one lock at a time with a thick, hot soap dunk and a bar of soap. I was intrigued.

 It seemed pretty simple until I tried to do it. The water was very hot and the locks turned into slippery little things that were very hard to hold onto-and it is VERY important that you hold onto them tightly. If you drop them, the locks fall apart when they hit the water.

After the dunking, you rub them carefully across a bar of mild soap to work up a good lather.

After the soaping, I laid them out and gave them a gentle squish to get it through all the fibers.I enjoyed this immensely.

I hung them over the sink divider to drain...

...followed by a rinse with more boiling hot water.

 The final step was to give them another hot rinse with tap water and a gentle squeeze to remove the excess while holding them very carefully to preserve the lock formation as much as possible.

 By now my hands were too pruney to continue so I had to come up with another way to do this.

 

Duh. 

Now I have a bunch of little white locks that I hope are clean enough to spin-but I am not done with them yet. Come back tomorrow to see what came next.