Romney is what I learned with and, being more coarse and with a longer staple (hair-length) than your luxe stuff it would be a more forgiving fibre to try with at the beginning. Just sayin' if you get frustrated it's not you, it's the fibre.
You can iron the bondable Angelina into sheets for fibre arts goodness.
Usually what we spinners do is just play with the loose stuff, carding it into our fibre. Whether it's bondable or not doesn't matter for that.
You can iron the bondable (read: melt-able) Angelina in between sheets of paper to make sparkly paper-like bling. If you wanted I guess you could cut it into strips and spin that back into your yarn, but it's scratchy when you bond it. Because the Angelina fibre is pretty fine it isn't scratchy for your regular spinning purposes.
Fun stuff! I've seen people put the bonded Angelina onto quilts as well as scrapbooks like patchworkarmy said.
How I do it is flick the cut end, like boulderbliss says, then draft it in, then add in some more other wool to keep the same thickness going. The lock stays in, sometimes I encase it when I ply with another thread. Make sense? Experiment!
Airtight is not really a good idea unless you go through your stuff really often. I think the general consensus is to store in paper/cloth bags. I do that because my place is dusty, and I don't need to worry about bugs where I live. Keeping clean fibre rather than unwashed stuff tends to attract the beasties less too. Often the problem is to keep the fibre away from your own animals and children in the house!
Hey knitwit, no probs. Skirting just means "taking off the undesireable parts". This means definitely the parts full of poop but also any low-quality fleece such as leg fleece, breech (bum) fleece, stuff stained with urine or markers (used by farmers for IDing, this stuff usually is bright blue, red, orange - not natural colours!). Everyone skirts; that stuff is just not part of what you want to spin.
You don't really need to cut anything. Just lay out the fleece shorn side down/tips up, part it the fleece where the good meets the bad, and toss. If you pull stuff apart, it's easier to pull from the tip end, not the shorn end.
My first full fleece (it was free) was crusty too, like the sheep was dirty and wet, then dried out, and then basked in the sun for a few weeks. The tips were crunchy and weak, the middle bit of the staple was just dirty, and the cut end was quite greasy. I tried lots of ways to deal with it. I tried just scouring, but the crusties needed very long soaking, and needed to be broken off anyway before spinning. I flicked some before washing. This took off the crusties and broke up the dirty bits and made washing much easier and faster. Labour intensive, though. I also just cut off the crusties then scoured. Some will say (and I agree) that having two cut ends is less desirable, but since the ends were really weak (broke off with a tug) anyway and had to go, it was the fastest way of doing it.
What was left over at the end of all that was a lovely fine wool but if I ever come across another fleece like that, even if it's free, I'll pass. Too much work, and there are so many better fleeces out there.
Just a suggestion if you try washing again on your own: get rid of the tags and dags before you start. Throw them in your compost; they're not worth washing and they're unsanitary, obvs. You'd probably want to skirt the fleece before you send it to a processor, too, so that you don't pay that extra weight for stuff they will throw out themselves.
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