Meet the Fleece: Mohair

The Wizard of Purple Pony Farms

Mohair is a fleece that doesn't get a lot of attention. Merino is cheaper, and often softer; alpaca is fluffier and more luxurious. And mohair...well, it comes with some challenges.

Petra, from Purple Pony Farms. And chickens.

To start with, mohair comes in two varieties: the soft, fluffy undercoat, and the wiry guard coat. One is very pleasant, almost luxurious. The other is more... penitential. A word I do not use lightly, as I will later explain.

The second challenge is what the mohair comes from: the magnificent angora goat. Let's be real, here: sheep stink. As in, they smell terrible. Anyone who has ever raised sheep, been around sheep, or dealt with raw lanolin for lotions knows what I'm talking about. There is a very distinct...aroma that comes from sheep.

Goats smell a lot worse. And heaven help you if you got your raw fleece from a buck. Even nanny goats have a tendency to reek; bucks make themselves stink on purpose. This is not a raw fleece you want to have open in the house.

However, this isn't a deal-breaker: for starters, the stink can be removed. Oxi-clean is a marvel. Add some white vinegar to the mix, and the first wash should end up smelling considerably less...rank.

And yes, the first wash. Most raw fleece will need more than one wash anyway. With mohair, it's a necessity. The first wash will get the initial nastiness and most of the dirt out, but unless you have a huge basin or a laundry sink to wash the fleece in, the first set of wash water is going to turn muddier than the Mississippi River in short order.

Raw mohair. This isn't the really nasty stuff.

One particularly helpful thing I've found when washing mohair is to let it soak. Now, I found this out more or less by accident: I put a load of it in my bucket to wash on Christmas, because we were due a warm spell and I wanted to get some of it done during that time. And right after Christmas, the whole house came down with a miserable flu, during which the mohair sat in its bucket of soapy water for the better part of a week, before I finally felt well enough to drag my carcass out and get it drained and on a screen to dry. I don't recommend leaving it to soak for as long as I did--but an overnight stay in vinegar and Oxi-clean actually helps get a lot more of the crud out the first time around. It still needed a secondary wash or two, but I didn't feel like I'd need rubber gloves to handle it after a good soak.

This stuff was washed twice. See the straw and other debris still in it?

However...this is where another issue with mohair arises. Dirt, grime, and other... substances... will come out in the wash. Straw, grit, and other assorted detritus will not. Mohair clings to its grit and straw with a passion normally reserved for smutty Booktok novels. This means that cleaning it like normal wool doesn't get all the stuff out. I've seen mohair that's gone through a mill cleaning still come out full of straw and grass. This means having a wool picker and wool combs to really rake out the debris is a must.

(Or you could do what I do, and use a set of dog combs to open the fleece, and then finish it with a flea comb to finally get out the last of the crud. This is incredibly labor-intensive, but it gets the stuff clean!)

Twice-washed, picked mohair. Still full of grit and vegetable matter.

My incredibly professional combing equipment.

The end result. It takes a long time to get even that much done!

Why, yes, this particular skein is available on the site!

The good thing is, once the mohair is finally clean, spinning it is easy. If you know how to spin merino, you can spin mohair. There are no adjustments to make to the tension or the bobbins, no special way to hold it, no particular technique needed to spin the mohair and not swear a blue streak at your spinning wheel or spindle as the yarn breaks, again. It's actually quite straightforward. Mohair has a good twist to it, it likes to stay twisted once it's been spun, and the long fibers mean that the yarn is one of the strongest you're going to find. Which leads us to the two kinds of yarn you can spin from it. Soft, fluffy mohair is the stuff that pretty much has to be combed out with the finest-toothed comb possible to make to get it clean, but the resulting yarn, while perhaps not soft enough to wear next to the skin, would make for great scarves, hats, shawls, or cardigans.

Guard hairs carded into rolags. Even those feel coarse and itchy!

Guard hair, on the other hand, doesn't hang onto detritus quite the same way...but this stuff is incredibly coarse and scratchy. Spinning it can feel a little like spinning razor wire, and it will either put calluses on your spinning fingers or take the skin off them, and there are times when you're not sure which will happen first. The resulting yarn is fuzzy, with random hairs sticking off every which way, and just handling the skeins tells you how itchy that stuff would be to wear next to your skin.

Remember how I called it penitential? Back in medieval times, certain saints often wore something called a 'hair shirt' as a kind of penance. It wasn't spun out of human hair, though that would be a kind of unpleasant itchiness that only someone with long hair would understand. It was spun out of the guard hairs of sheep and goats.

However, if you do choose to spin the guard hairs of the mohair you have, you don't have to do it with the mindset of medieval penance. Guard hairs are also extremely strong, can be spun into thin thread, and like to tangle onto each other when knitted or woven. It would likely make for a nice, nearly weather-proof shell for a coat--or, if you're into reenactment, a cloak--or be knitted into a strong bag or tote.

In conclusion, mohair is a nice workhorse of a fleece. It's certainly got its challenges--but the end result, in my opinion, is very much worth it.