There is traceable wool, and then there is wool where you can point to a photograph and say, “That sheep. It came from her.”
Meet Delilah.
Delilah is a much-loved Ryeland sheep here in Perthshire, and over the past few weeks I’ve been working my way through her fleece, taking it from raw wool all the way to finished handspun yarn.
And there was quite a lot of it.
From one sheep
Working with an individual fleece is very different from starting with commercially prepared fibre.
A raw fleece isn’t a uniform material. Different parts of the sheep have different lengths and qualities of wool. There are bits you want, bits you don’t, dirt, lanolin, vegetable matter and occasionally things best left undescribed.
The first job was sorting through Delilah’s fleece and choosing the wool I wanted to spin. From there, I washed it carefully in batches, removing the grease and dirt without agitating the wool enough to felt it.
What emerged was a rather enormous cloud of creamy white Ryeland wool.
Preparing Delilah’s fleece
I decided to prepare the fleece for a woollen-style yarn, carding the clean fibre by hand into rolags.
Carding opens and blends the fibres while leaving plenty of air in the preparation. Once spun, that helps create the lofty, warm, distinctly woolly yarn I wanted from this fleece.
Then came the spinning.
And more spinning.
And, somehow, still more spinning.
It’s easy to lose sight of the amount of fibre a sheep actually produces when we normally encounter wool as neat balls and skeins on a shelf. Processing one fleece entirely by hand makes the scale of it wonderfully, sometimes alarmingly, obvious.
Each rolag was spun into a single, and the singles were then plied together to make the finished yarn. After winding the yarn into skeins, everything had one final wash and was hung to dry.
Only then did I get to see what Delilah’s fleece had become.
This is Delilah & This is her yarn.
The finished yarn is creamy, springy and full of character. It isn’t trying to look like something produced by a mill. There are small variations throughout it from the fleece, the preparation and my own hands.
That is part of what I love about it.
But the most important thing about this yarn isn’t its colour, its twist or even the fact that it was spun by hand.
It’s that Delilah is still part of its story.
We talk a great deal about traceability in wool, but traceability can exist at many different scales. Sometimes it means knowing the country where wool was produced. Sometimes the region, breed or farm.
Here, I can trace the finished skeins all the way back to one particular sheep.
That connection changes the way I think about the material. Wool stops being an anonymous raw material and becomes the product of an animal, a landscape and the people who care for both.
Farmer to maker
Delilah’s yarn also marks a small milestone for Highland Magic. This is the first batch I’ve tagged both as my own handspun yarn and in support of The Farmer’s Yarn.
The Farmer’s Yarn celebrates British wool travelling directly from farmers to makers, keeping more of the identity and value of the fibre attached to the people and places that produced it.
That fits very naturally with what I want to do through Highland Magic: work with wool whose story doesn’t disappear somewhere between the sheep and the skein.
Delilah is perhaps the most literal version of that idea yet.
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