Throughout the Spring semester of last year, our Village Homeschoolers 3rd through 7th grade transformed a dirty fleece sheared from a sheep to a small piece of cloth!
To begin this project, Ms. Claudia took a trip to New Mexico to attend the Taos Wool Festival, to bring back freshly sheared fleece, which was done right in front of her eyes! After the students washed and carded the wool, they began handspinning the carded rolags into yarn. Once completed, the students began chopping raw beets, to be added into boiling water for the yarn to soak. As they approached the final steps of this extravagant project, they created individual cardboard looms and put the wrap threads on them. Finally, they wove yarn into cloth!
This whole process was documented by the Village Homeschool students in their main lesson books, where they were able to reflect on this journey!
Things that surprised them:
How the raw wool smelled like the zoo before we washed it!
How oily the lanolin was on our hands from start to finish!
How we got different colors from the beets!
How tricky carding and spinning is!
How LONG this project took!
We learned that it’s a BIG but satisfying job to create cloth!
We are so excited for this year's Wednesday homeschool class to take part in new adventures like the From Sheep to Cloth project they completed last May!
