Gotland (Gotlandsfår) - Sweden

Gotlandsfår, more commonly known as Gotland, is a breed of sheep from Sweden that was developed in the 20th century from the more primitive Gutefår (also known as Gute or Gotland Outdoor sheep) by breeding them with Karakuls (from central Asia) and Romanovs (from Russia) in the 1920's and 1930's.  There is a geographical coincidence to the breeds origins on the island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea. 

They are fine boned and medium sized sheep. Both sexes are polled.  They have black heads and legs, which are free of wool, although white markings may appear on the top of the head or around the nose and mouth.  The tail is short with a hair covered tip.  Rams weigh around 75-85kg and ewes weigh around 55-70kg. They are docile and friendly, although older rams can become quite aggressive.

They are bred mainly for their sheepskins and meat and because the focus has been on producing good sheepskin the double coat has been replaced by a fleece made up of purely guard hairs.  They are the only Swedish sheep breed that is it not in a conservation program due to the high numbers of them, 15,817 breeding ewes as of 2021.  Whilst their sheepskins are popular in Europe, elsewhere their fleece is prized by handspinners.

The wool of the Gotland is quite unusual.  It closely resembles a fine mohair or an English lustre longwool more than it does it other Northern European Short Tail breeds to which it belongs.  Lambs are quite often born black and the fleece will lighten with age and continue to lighten throughout their lives.  The predominant colours are a range of grey that starts with a very pale silver grey right through to charcoal grey that is very close to black.  Black, brown and white fleece can be found but are quite rare.  Different strains of Gotlands have different fleece characteristics but they all have great length, lustre and a well-developed wavy crimp.

Commercially processed top is known to often be more matte and coarser than when it is hand combed from fleece when it seems to be shinier and softer and two can feel like completely different breeds.  I have personally experienced this difference.

It can be spun into smooth or heavily textured yarns and the beautiful clean unspun locks often decorate other textiles.  It can be felted and it is more comfortable in next-to-skin items  that would be expected of other fibres in the same micron range.  Fabric can be lightweight, durable and drape well whilst also possessing a subtle gleam

There is a strain of Gotlands in New Zealand that has been bred for increased fineness and their wool was used to make the Elven cloaks worn by the main characters in all three of the Lord of the Rings movies.

Fleece weights are usually 2.5kg-5kg and the staple length can be variable but usually 7.5cm-18cm (3-7 inches) but sometimes they are sheared twice a year to produce staples that are 7.5-10cm (3-4 inches).  In terms of fibre diameters, lambs can be as fine as 18 microns to low mid-20s and adults range from 27-35 microns.  The locks are relatively long, high lustre, really wavy and sometimes curly and they feel silky.  The tips of the locks often turn brown.  The natural grey colour is beautiful as it is but can be dyed, with the natural grey influencing the shade and tone of resulting colour.

The fine fibres can be a bit flyaway, especially in dry climates but the locks can be spun directly from the locks, flicked, combed or, if you have shorter fibres, you can card.  Gotland lends itself to be spun into fine yarns far easier than being spun into bulkier yarns.  Prepared fibre for spinning appears quite fluffy but when it is spun the yarn will have a heavier feeling to it and will have a lot of drape.  Its quite slippery too.  It can be spun woollen style from batts or rolags, which will give texture or you can spin worsted style from top for fine shiny drapey yarns. 

I bought this breed in as 105g of unwashed raw fleece that was part of a sample pack that featured 8 different Swedish breeds that I purchased back in early May 2022 from a lady called Anita Grahn based in Uppsala, Sweden.  I was going to add a link for Anita and her shop but when I looked her last social media post was in October of 2024 stating that she was in hospital and she has not posted anything since and her online shop is empty as of April 2025. I do hope she is OK.  However, I can provide a link to Swedish Fibre, a small business run by Sandy Zetterlund who has a passion for knitting, wool, spinning and now a passion for bringing these beautiful fleece from these rare conservation sheep kept by small farmers into the limelight and put them in front of similarly passionate hand spinners like myself who care about ensuring the future and continuation of these rare and unique breeds.  The demand for and sale of the fleece from these rare breeds really do help the survival of the breed.  

There doesn't appear to be much different between the dirty fleece above the washed fleece below in terms of colour but when I was sorting the fleece out prior to washing, 11g of second cuts was removed reducing the amount straight down to 94g and once it was washed and dried this became 84g.

When I combed this in May 2022 I got 55g of hand combed top from it.  I thought it might be enough but then I decided to add 50g of some commercially prepared Gotland that was in my stash.  The colours are quite different with a slight brownish cast to the commercial prep. 

To even this out I split lots into two equal amounts and then used my blending hackle to physically blend and combine the different colours together to give a more even colour.  I lost an amount of the shortest fibres from both types of prep in the blending hackle prongs but the colour is now more even and I have a nice 91g to spin.

As this wool leans more towards a Longwool type than anything else, the yarn produced will be a heavier, more dense type of wool and will have good drape.  I spun this over 3 days, 5th, 6th and plied on the 7th July 2025.

It has spun up as a 16wpi yarn, although it does feel a lot heavier in the hand than some other yarns, that would be down to the denseness of this type of wool.  It is 89g/249m and it is not as soft as other Gotland that I spun in the past.  I knit the panel for my project over a couple of days 21st-23rd July 2025, due to the hot, sticky, humid weather.  This and the small sample for my scrapbook used up 25g/70m of yarn.

I had to pin this one to keep it open, even after blocking, as it just wants to roll the edges up.  I hope that it is readable.

Advent Calendar 2024 Day 8 - Nakatomi

This one isn't about a person, it's not actually a character, it's a building that got damaged a lot.  Die Hard, is it really a Christmas movie?  The events take place during Christmas so I guess it is but there are no flying reindeer, just a flying (or falling) Alan Rickman, out of a window. All the information can be found in the first photo and if you click on the photo you can zoom in if you need to.

I like the designs on the little packets and this one features a Santa hat, which one of the dispatched "bad guys" (I won't use the word used in the movie here as it is bound to be picked up by word watching technologies) was wearing when the elevator doors opened, but this design is less gruesome.

I have undone the tightly wrapped little bundles and made them into braids to take any pressures off the fibres and also so that I can see the colours properly and feel the texture too.  I do have some Gotland somewhere that I may be able to use with this but due to the fact that there are very subtle hints of other colours running through this I will most likely just order another bump of this one.

Advent Calendar 2023 Day 8

The Tradition

Day 8 is called La Ribote and the tradition comes from Martinique in the Caribbean.  Music and singing features a lot in the Christmas celebrations on the Island and a Ribote is the term used for the tradition of a large group of people that go from house to house singing hymns and carols on the evening and sometimes they will call in on people who are working such as Fire Stations, Hospitals etc and then after all of the singing they are usually invited to share in food and drinks.

The Fibre

The actual fibre content is 50% Bamboo (Amelia & Naomi), 40% Gotland (grey & white), 10% Mulberry Silk (Buenos Aires). Martinique is a beautiful island and this is an absolutely beautiful blend to go with it.  Just because it's winter doesn't mean the colours are going to be any different.  We have got bamboo, Gotland and Mulberry Silk.  Bamboo and Mulberry Silk are really soft fibres so the Gotland is in here to hold it all together and this Gotland also adds a bit of sheen because Gotland is a lustre wool.  If you look really closely at this blend you can see there are lots of different shades in it.  We've taken all the blues from the Mulberry Silk ranges and the Bamboo ranges and blended them with Gotland to get this lovely shiny fibre.  In terms of spinning if you were to spin this quite fine or make a four ply with it you find it has very good drape when its knitted or crocheted.  

My Thoughts

I love this one.  I love most things blue and I do like a bit of Gotland and I never say no to blends with Mulberry Silk in them.  I did have a lot of trouble trying to capture the colours in the original photo with my mobile phone, it just would not show all of the lovely tones.  I would say that it will be spun as it is, there is no way these colours can be separated out at all, it's too well blended for that.

This one is so different to how the camera on my phone captured the colours and at the time I couldn't get it to show all the variation of blues and greys that are in this blend but my proper Canon camera has.

The information that has been printed on the bags is not always correct and there are no fibre content percentages, these have been provided on the chat boards.  The percentages that they gave on the chat boards seem to be correct for this one, Hurrah!

What I have done with my bags is to write the actual fibre content on the bag using a gold gel pen in the gap immediately below the printed details, pretty much the only thing that will show up on black are the metallic gel pens.  This is why I have not taken "new" photos of the bags.

Gotland fleece part II

This follows on from my post about the problematical Gotland fleece that I bought earlier this year.

I took my 239g of shorter fibre hand combed nests and spun them into this lovely fine yarn to produce a Fingering Weight yarn of 235g/648m.  You may notice that 4g are missing, this was the last of the dirt that washed out after the combs opened up the locks.

I then went on to make a Sport Weight yarn, 2 skeins: 93g/307m and 101g/324m and its a medium-grey colour.

The last of the hand combed nests were spun into this Sport Weight yarn, 2 skeins: 115g/335m and 116g/342m and this is a dark grey colour.

Considering the fact that I spun the nests up randomly, I appear to have made two different shades of grey yarn from the longest fibres.  This has worked out pretty well I think seeing as there was no deliberate intention of making light and dark grey yarns, its done it all by itself.  Here they are, side by side.

Gotland fleece Part I

I wanted a longwool that wasn't white and I did make enquiries about a Black Wensleydale fleece, which are rare to come by, but it was out of my league financially.  I settled on this Gotland fleece from P J Watts of Kingston Manor Farm, Canterbury, the same lady I bought the Romney fleece from.

When it arrived it weighed 1673g and I was really excited by the high lustre of the grey locks and it was really soft too.  Yes, it had sunburnt tips, a lot of fleece does and these break off during preparation, but what I wasn't expecting was what I discovered at the sheared end of the locks.

So, just what was at the sheared end of the locks?  A nice big scurf and lanolin encrusted "rise".  The "rise" is the name given to the part of the lock that indicates the end of last seasons growth and the start of the new seasons growth and this part of the lock is weak and normally breaks off.  You get this "rise" in every fleece but it is not usually this big and not usually this visually pronounced.  I think the breed of the sheep has a lot to do with it in this case.

I made a start on washing the fleece but was finding it really difficult to pull the individual locks away from the main fleece, this was because of this nasty matted rise as the white strip was pretty much felted.  I asked for advice from other spinners on a forum of what would be the best way to proceed with this problematical fleece and discovered that this particular breed of sheep needs to be sheared around January/February time, due to this breeds individual fleece growth season.  This fleece wasn't sheared until June 2014.  As you can see from these photos, this "rise" accounts for about 1/3 of the lock length and this has to be removed and binned.  The easiest way to proceed was to remove the rise, either by pulling it off if it will, or cutting if off if needs be, before washing the fleece.  I done a mixture of these methods.

After removing the "rise" from the majority of the fleece and washing it, my original 1673g was reduced to 960g.  When it came to the combing process, I started with the small amount of fleece that I had not already removed this rise from.  I loaded my comb lock by lock, as usual, making sure that the "rise" was at the back of the comb as I only want to be combing the good part of the fleece and leaving the rubbish at the back of the comb.  See the photos below of this loading process.

The photos in the top row below show what this same comb-full of locks looks like after one pass through.  The photos on the bottom row show the rise that had broken off during the combing process along with a bit of coarse fibres then what the rubbish looked like once I had removed it from the comb and before it went in the bin.

The photos below show the locks after their second comb through, with the last photo showing the rubbish produced this time.

I always do at least 3 full pass-through's of the combs on every fleece that I prepare.  A full pass-through is combing the locks from one comb to the other until all that is left is the rubbish on the comb that you are combing from, which is removed from that particular comb, swap combs from one hand to the other and go again for the next pass through.

As you can see by the end of the third pass through of the combs, there is not a lot of rubbish and from the last photo you can see that it is mostly the sunburnt tips that have now broken off.

I dizzed this off the combs, stopping about 3" short of the comb and pulling away so that all of the shortest fibres, 3" or less, were left on the comb.  The longest fibres which I had dizzed off were made into a nest and put in one bag and then I returned to the combs and dizzed off the shorter fibres into nests and these went into a different bag.  At the end of the combing process I was left with 239g of the shorter fibres and 461g of the longer fibres.

Gotland Roving

This is another bag of roving, from those that I purchased from Griffiths Mill at The Staffordshire County Show.  For the fact that Gotland is supposed to be soft, long stapled fleece, this roving has quite a lot of short fibres in it and also is not what I would call soft at all.  It feels a little crisp/prickly to me.

Spun up as one single and left as such I have 235m from 100g of roving.  Its OK, but not at all what I was expecting after reading such wonderful reviews about Gotland Fleece.  Maybe one day I will try preparing it myself from a fleece and see if that makes a difference to the final yarn.