Making yarn from raw wool is a long, labor-intensive process. Our equipment significantly reduces the labor required to process a fleece by hand. And it’s REALLY FUN! The heady smell of raw wool, the hum of the equipment, the shimmer and fluff of beautiful fibers ready for your crafty hands . . . it’s all so inviting! Seriously—come for a visit, we’ll put you to work, and you’ll be HOOKED. Making yarn is magical!

Wool is GREASY. If you’ve ever touched raw fleece, you know. The wool feels heavy and a little sticky. Your fingers are a little slippery. That’s the wool grease, which contains lanolin, a waxy substance that sheds water to keep the sheep dry. It can be refined and is used in many personal care products. But it is NOT good for our equipment, so we remove as much of it as we can, along with other contaminants (dirt, urine, poo, etc.) using extremely hot water and a mild detergent. Raw wool is cleaned with a minimum of one forty-minute soak, four washes, and two rinse cycles before it is air dried on racks. Fine wool often requires additional washing.

We have two large vats dedicated to dyeing wool. We dye the clean fleece before it moves on to any other processing. This allows us to blend colors during the production of our yarn instead of dyeing the skeins after they are completed. We use very hot water, acid dyes, citric acid, and salts to achieve vibrant, colorfast hues. We then rinse the wool in clean water and lay it on racks to dry.

The wool’s next stop is the dehairer. Also called a fiber separator, this machine is a magical beast. It removes probably 95% of the stuff we don’t want in our yarn. This includes pieces too short to spin, guard hairs, and almost all the remaining VM. It uses a series of toothed drums to separate the good (which is collected at the end in a beautiful cloud of cotton candy) from the bad (which is caged underneath).