one third more fat than regular sheep!
Today's word is suint (also spelled swint), that slippery, slimy, greasy substance that must have horribly polluted the Trout River at the Wilders' sheep-washing time. Since there's no great loss without some small gain (as Caroline Ingalls always said), I'm sure James and Royal Wilder, French Joe, and Lazy John had really soft skin after washing all those sheep!

Wool, besides the moisture and dirt which it naturally contains, is made up of three ingredients: suint, wool fat, and pure wool hair. The suint is an excretion of the perspiration glands of the skin; it chiefly consists of a compound of potassium with an organic acid containing nitrogen. Suint is soluble in cold water, and is in great part removed when sheep are washed before shearing. In the case of Merino sheep, the suint may amount to a third to more than half the weight of the unwashed fleece, but in the case of ordinary sheep, freely exposed to the weather, the quantity may be 15 percent or less. In a washed fleece the wool fat may vary from more than thirty percent to eight percent or less (note that this is after the suint has been washed away). Short fine wool contains the largest proportion of fat.

Merino wool is wonderfully wavy, sometimes having as much as thirty crimps per inch. As it grows, it is coated with and saturated with the suint, which causes the wool to shed water and prevents it from tangling or felting while on the sheep's back. It also causes dirt to stick, and it is for this reason that sheep were usually washed before being shearing. The wool as it is clipped doesn't fall apart like bunches of hair, but holds together like a skin, and as Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote, it could be rolled up and tied into a bundle, each fleece by itself.

Mrs. Wilder doesn't mention a second washing of the fleece, which typically took place prior to carding. It was during this second warm washing that the wool fat, or lanolin, could all or partly be removed from the fleece. Lanolin could be skimmed and saved for use in the making of soap or sold as a natural lotion or lubricant. One Merino fleece could yield from 3 to 12 ounces of lanolin.
- posted by pioneergirl at 6:30 PM