The Wool’s Journey

I also source wools from the Lake District and the Western Highlands of Scotland. I create my yarns mainly from Bluefaced Leicester from the Dales; Hebridean from Cumbria, and Black Welsh Mountain and Shetland from Scotland. Many farmers in the Dales keep small flocks of Bluefaced Leicesters to breed with their Swaledales. The resulting offspring is known as a North of England Mule. Farmers often put different breeds together to produce better quality meat or wool, to make lambing easier and to reliably produce two lambs per breeding ewe each year.

Finding a dry day up here is a rarity so sheep are often clipped inside as wet, claggy fleece won’t last long. The first clip is during the sheep’s second year which produces a large shearling fleece. After that they are clipped annually. Clipping is a skill which takes time to learn well. It is usually accomplished these days with the aid of electric shears. The aim is to remove the fleece in one piece as smoothly and quickly as possible to avoid over-stressing the animal. As one of my (small lady) farmers tells me, you don’t have to be a big hunking fellow to be able to clip, you just have to know what you are doing!

Well bred sheep win prizes! An amazing amount of pampering and preening goes into getting the animals ready for a show. Their coats are carefully clipped again, nails and ears cleaned, noses and legs washed and brushed, and any last minute ‘muck buttons’ removed so the judges can see the animals at their best. A judge will look at all sorts of factors, including quality of coat, colouring and stance, all of which will vary between breeds, to find the best animal in the ring.

I wait for a dry day (that can mean a long wait in this part of the world!), lay a tarpaulin on the ground in my garden and work though each fleece one at a time. I open up the fleece and spread it out then remove all the daggy bits (aka “muck buttons” or “poo”), all the matted and felted areas, the tail area and the belly wool. All the straw and other vegetable matter and foreign materials (plastic, wire, stones, etc.) need to be removed as well. Then the cleaned up fleece goes in a clean bag. When I’ve gone through my entire collection I will pile it all in a van and drive it to the scouring plant in Bradford.

Here, at a huge complex of old mill buildings which has been in continuous operation for well over 100 years, my fleece is pulled apart, washed in a series of tubs and eventually dried. Washing removes the dirt and natural oils (lanolin) from the fleece. Drying removes excess moisture. There is a typical weight loss of over 40% at this stage in the process – that’s a lot of dirt, oil and moisture and was quite a shock the first time to realise I had just lost nearly half my raw material! But what is left is a lovely fluffy mountain of clean white wool which, once baled, is ready to take to the spinner.

This blend is then put into the carding machine where it travels through a system of increasingly fine carders to create a roving which is carded once again before being spread on leather belts which determine the final thickness of the yarn. Fine rovings with a slight twist are produced from the belts. These are wound into cheeses and sent to the spinning jenny. Here the roving is teased out to the required yarn count before being wound onto cones. From here the yarn is sent to the Weaver.

Once the required number of warp ends have been wound to the required length, the entire warp is wound onto a large beam which is transferred to the loom. Individual warp ends are then drawn from the beam through a series of heddles and shafts, sleyed through a reed according to the required sett (density), and finally are fastened to another beam at the front of the loom. Once tied on the warp is ready for weaving. Weft yarns are wound onto bobbins which are inserted into flying shuttles. The loom is switched on and the weaving begins!

The woven cloth’s final journey is to the finishers.

Here the cloth is washed again to remove spinning oils and dirt picked up in the weaving process. Fringes are purled and woollen cloth is fulled until it reaches the required size and thickness. In olden days cloth would have been pegged out to dry on a field, a process known as tentering. Woven cloth can be dyed in-the-piece at the finishers, a skilled art requiring the adding of colour without changing the quality of the finished fabric. Steaming and blowing and raising are other jobs done by the finisher to give the cloth its final look and feel. And last but not least the long woven pieces are then cut into individual throws and scarves and packaged up as finished articles. Visit the shop for more details of my latest offerings!