Varafeldur Project – Part One

In my previous post I touched on my planned projects. The varfeldur viking cloak I am going to make has been the most overwhelming so far. Some weavers have made varafeldurs and are much more educated than I am. Here are some links if you’d like to read what they have written:

The weavers above used a weighted tapestry loom. I’ll be using a countermarch floor loom at the Icelandic Textile Center. If I were doing this at home, I would use my 48″ rigid heddle loom and freedom roller extension.

According to the Norwegian Textile Letter article, the varafeldur should be 4 ells long and 2 ells wide with 13 knots of wool in each row, using a 2-ply wool yarn between the rows of Icelandic rya knots. 1 ell = 18″ or .45 meters. My varafeldur will be 72″ long by 36″ wide.

Here are the materials I purchased:

Yarn for Warp & Weft:

Mountain Meadow Wool 2-ply Suffolk Worsted made in Buffalo, Wyoming, USA. Wyoming is a neighbor to Utah, where I live. So it’s local-ish!

Mountain Meadow Wool Mill Suffolk Worsted in Natural Cream

Wool Fleece for Icelandic Rya Knots:

I purchased three raw wool fleeces from Cowgirl Yarn in Laramie, Wyoming, USA. I now wish I would have bought scoured and washed fleece, but it has been a great learning experience.

I meant to buy only Icelandic fleece, but I mistakenly bought one Jacob sheep fleece.

Here are the three bags of fleece:

3 bags of raw fleece: Nancy – Jacob fleece, Puck – Icelandic fleece, and Lotus – Icelandic fleece.

I started by taking each fleece outside and laying them one at a time on a picnic table. I wasn’t sure if they had been skirted – so I watched several YouTube videos to learn how to do it. My favorite video was made by Shepherd Industries in North Dakota (their YouTube Channel is called ‘EweTube’!).

Here is Lotus’ fleece on the table before I skirted it. I removed debris, matted wool, small bits, and poop.

I forgot to take picture of Nancy’s fleece!

Once skirting was complete, I started researching how to wash them without felting. I have a lot of experienced online weaving friends, and Nancy from my online guild shared some good tips. And I also went back to EweTube and decided to follow their washing tips.

My washing tools: Dawn dish soap, a potato masher, mesh laundry bag, and plastic storage container in the bathtub.

I washed Nancy’s fleece first. Here it is drying on the bathroom floor overnight:

I don’t know if I did any of this right. But the fleece at least smells clean and I did get out a lot, if not all, of the dirt and debris.

Unwashed Lotus fleece on top, washed & dried Lotus fleece on bottom.

Here are pictures of the sweet sheep – top left – Puck, top right – Nancy, bottom – Lotus.