I’ve been thinking a lot about smallholder wool lately-
This probably isn’t a huge surprise if you’ve been following along, because I seem to have spent an increasing amount of this year talking to farmers, finding fleeces, washing fleeces, sending wool off to mills, researching processing and generally getting far more involved in the journey between sheep and skein than I'd seen in my future.
One of the projects to come out of all of this is my smallholder yarn: t’s a blend of Ryeland, Shetland and alpaca, sourced from small producers here in Scotland. They’re quite different fibres, which is part of the point. The Ryeland has body and bounce, the Shetland brings versatility and character, and the alpaca adds softness and drape. Together they make a yarn that I really like working with.
However, the blend also came about because I’ve been thinking about scale. Smallholders often have really lovely wool. What they don’t necessarily have is a lot of it.
If you have a couple of sheep, a few fleeces can be an enormous amount of wool to deal with yourself, but it’s a tiny amount once you start looking at commercial processing. Even a whole small flock can produce quantities that don’t fit particularly neatly into a system built to handle wool on a much larger scale.
As a handspinner, I can happily take one fleece and spend weeks working my way through it. I love doing that. I recently processed and spun an entire Ryeland fleece from a sheep called Delilah, and being able to follow one animal’s wool all the way from a raw fleece to finished skeins is incredibly satisfying. I don’t think traceable yarn always has to mean yarn from one sheep, or even one flock.
That’s where this blend gets interesting- rather than looking at several small quantities of fibre and seeing a problem, what happens if we put them together deliberately? Not an anonymous mixture where nobody quite knows what went into it or where it came from. A yarn where I can tell you what the breeds are, where the fibre came from and why I chose to combine them.
That still feels very much like traceability to me. It also raises a much bigger question about what we do with small quantities of Scottish wool.
I’ve been learning a lot about the less glamorous bit in the middle of the process. Once a fleece leaves the sheep, there is a daunting amount of work that has to happen before I can pick up a finished skein. Sorting, scouring, preparation, blending and spinning all require equipment, time and expertise, and accessing that processing at small and medium scales isn’t always straightforward.
I’ve ended up having conversations this year that I absolutely did not anticipate when I started a fibre arts business. Regional scouring capacity! Mill minimums! Transport! Supply chains! Somewhere along the way I have become extremely interested in wool infrastructure. It’s difficult not to, once you start following the material backwards.
I spend so much of my time at the other end of the process. I spin yarn, dye it, weave with it and make artwork from it. I know how dramatically a material can change as it moves through those stages. A fleece can become prepared fibre. That fibre can become yarn. I can put that yarn into a dye pot, or onto a loom, or combine it with other yarns. Eventually it might become a piece of cloth or a tapestry hanging on somebody’s wall. There’s an enormous amount of possibility sitting inside the original fleece.
So I’m increasingly interested in whether there are better ways of joining up those two ends of the story, particularly for smaller producers.
The Ryeland, Shetland and alpaca in this yarn didn’t need to exist as three separate products for their origins to matter. Bringing them together gave me enough fibre to make something useful, but it also gave me a chance to design the yarn around the qualities of the wool rather than treating the wool as a generic raw material. I’m still working out what that could mean on a larger scale. There are plenty of practical problems involved, but there's something important here.
Three small sources of fibre became one yarn, without having to lose the story of where any of it came from.
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