If you look through the 8th edition (1860) of Dr. Chase’s Recipes or Information for Everybody: An Invaluable Collection of About Six Hundred Practical Recipes, you’ll find a short recipe for scouring raw wool. It consists of two ingredients: urine & hot water and specifically says never to use soap.

I’ve heard all about people using urine over the centuries for washing wool and setting dyes with it as well, but hadn’t considered trying it for obvious reasons. Those reasons being 1) it would take a lot of urine to scour a whole fleece, 2) it stinks to high heaven, and 3) the urine has to sit for much longer than I would want to store it.

But there had to be some reason why people used that method for such a long period of time, so I figured, what the heck, I’ll give it a try and see what all the fuss is about.

Following Dr. Chase’s recipe, I collected my urine during the course of a day (my old lady bladder actually served a purpose that day) and stored it in a glass jar with screw lid (to ensure no accidents) and left it under my bathroom sink for a full week. I only collected enough to scour about an ounce of wool, but that was plenty to do the experiment. (I won’t repeat the words or looks from my husband when I told him what I was up to. I just ensured him that he wouldn’t be home when I decided to use it).

So, today was the day. I cold washed the fleece sample to reduce rinses before pouring my stale pee into the 5-gallon bucket I use to scour wool in (in my bathroom) and added hot water from my bathtub. Before doing this, I lit two candles to help with the smell, but I’m sorry to say that it didn’t do much good. I’m not great with bad smells—which is why I choose not to suint wash fleece anymore, but this was on another level. I won’t go into detail, but you can use your imagination (or not).

After the second rinse, the odor began to dissipate.

Final results: Fleece sample was cleaner, but it didn’t seem to remove the lanolin (at all), so I’m thinking that I didn’t have enough urine to wool. Does this seem like an efficient way to scour fleece? Not really—at least not by today’s standards, but then again, maybe I just had the ratio wrong. But, at least I can say I tried.

My second scouring project was using dried soapwort leaves from the Burritt’s herb garden (collected last year). Soapwort (Saponaria officinalis) was used by the ancient Greeks to wash wool and it is still used by museum conservations to gently wash textile pieces.

After steeping the leaves for about 20 minutes, I added the strained liquid to hot water before adding the cold washed fleece sample. I left it to scour for 30 minutes before rinsing.

The finished result was much better than the urine-scour sample. Not only did the soapwort remove the dirt, it also took some of the lanolin, leaving enough so I can use it as a sizing agent on the yarn that I’ll spin before putting the sample on my loom. The final scour will come during the fulling process.