Willowing Wool: Building Community by Sharing the Work

Like many handspinners, I frequently marvel at the fact that textile production was a facet of everyday life for most humans until the past couple of centuries. While I’m glad to live in our modern era—and in a city with a robust handspinning and weaving community—I can’t help but imagine past landscapes, living among neighbors who understand the process of turning raw fiber into functional cloth, sharing in the act of creation and maintenance of our work.

In my work as a teaching artist, I come across many people who want to create alongside others, both in classrooms and in more unstructured settings. I’m always looking for ways to connect people through textile work, particularly across generations and levels of expertise. After learning about wool waulking, a Scottish tradition for finishing woolen cloth revitalized by Marshfield School of Weaving founder Norman Kennedy, I began to imagine an analogue for handspinning. Waulking brings together a group to share the work of evenly fulling cloth through a kneading-like process, slowly at first and then faster and faster, calibrated to song. I wondered, is there a way to bring community into handspinning before waulking, before the yarn is even spun?

Willowing Border Leicester wool. Photo by Jesse Telephone

What is Willowing?

After some research, I found my answer in willowing, an antiquated fiber-prep technique used to open up locks and allow bits of vegetable matter, or VM, to fall out by hitting it with flexible willow branches. As is often the case with esoteric techniques, it’s difficult to track down much information about willowing. I first became acquainted with the concept while reading through The Alden Amos Big Book of Handspinning, with the following amusing description:

“Willowing is nothing more than spreading the picked, loose wool out on a coarse screen or lattice and flogging the hell out of it with a couple of smooth, limber sticks or switches. Hold one stick in each hand and whip away, right-left-right-left, and so on. You can work off petty frustrations while removing an amazing amount of junk from your fleece.”¹

Amos recommends willowing a fleece before scouring, which opens up clumps of fiber so the scouring bath can fully permeate the fleece, then willowing again after it dries to help remove VM.

From left to right, each group of fibers has been scoured, then willowed once, then picked. From top to bottom: Polypay, Border Leicester, and Corriedale wool.

Willowing, Then and Now

During the Middle Ages, professionals as well as some lay people across Northern Europe would beat