Bought on Etsy nearly a year ago (August 23, 2025), Athena’s grey fleece arrived a week later with a bit more VM than expected and weighing in at about 3 pounds.

Characteristic of double-coated Shetlands, the fleece is a mix of long and short staple locks. These can be sorted out to spin separately or kept together. It reminds me of Icelandic but not as scratchy. It’s quite soft, and like most Shetlands, had a good bit of lanolin (the white crust over the water in the picture below).

I actually scoured the fleece last year, about a week after it arrived. Evidently, I forgot to weigh it after scouring. Now I’ve already started processing it, and, hoo boy, there’s a lot of waste.

In July, I finally finished Elektra’s black Shetland fleece and needed something else to spin, so I did a trial run with the crappy white Gulf Coast Native fleece, which was just no.

Turning to Athena’s fleece, I ran some of the fiber through the drum carder to see what would happen. I discovered that there’s just way too much VM, and it needs combing.

I ran some through the hackle and comb and quickly learned that my little hackle was far too small to take on a whole fleece with a ton of VM. I filmed it for fun and ended up learning that I had accidentally made an ASMR video, the existence of which genre I was previously completely ignorant.

I replaced the tiny hackle with one more suited to the task and employed the workbench in the way in which I had initially intended, which works way better than the clamps that come with the tool.

The basket on top the workbench holds the waste wool, the basket on the floor, the dizzed slivers.

And here we have the scoured but unprocessed fleece next to the slivers (the batt I made is fluffed up under the slivers).

Processing Athena’s fleece has joined the ongoing projects of fixing the loom (still waiting on Leclerc), making a felted fleece rug (it’s just too damned hot for that right now), and making a distaff or two out of fallen limbs.