Sorting

Bales of wool waiting to be sorted at one of Early's mills, 1898.

Wool for blanket making would have been delivered to the mill as bales of sheep's wool already sorted by the wool supplier; it would require many different processes to transform it into a finished blanket. Most blankets were made from more than one type of wool. A mixture of imported (chiefly from New Zealand, South America and Australia) and home-grown wools were commonly used, including 'fleece wool' shorn from live sheep and 'fell wool' recovered from dead sheep skins by fellmongers.

There are between nine and fourteen different qualities of wool to be found on each individual sheep, depending on the breed and country of origin. The same quality of wool is found in the same place on every fleece, so to get a uniform type of wool it would have to be divided out by hand. On the fleece of the common sheep 'shoulder wool', which is long and fine in character and grows close and evenly, is deemed to be to the best while 'shank wool' is rough, short, hard and of very little value. There are many other qualities in between these two. So it is the quality combined with the length (and sometimes the colour) of a wool staple that is important. In practice, though, fleeces were rarely divided out into all fourteen qualities at the sorting bench in the mill, six or seven being more common. Only a little of each type can be got from each fleece so hundreds of fleeces would be used each week by a blanket factory.

This poem entitled 'The Fleece' by John Dyer was written in 1757 and highlights the importance of careful grading and sorting of wool in the cloth making process:

In the same fleece diversity of wool
Grows intermingled, and excites the care
Of curious skill to sort the several kinds.
Nimbly with habitual speed
They sever lock from lock, and long and short
And soft and rigid, pile in sev'ral heaps.

Clare Sumner