Sheep were domesticated nearly 7000 years ago. Humans have been utilizing their wool for clothing production for nearly 4000 years.

The Process

Animals

The process, of course, begins out in the barn. Each spring, usually in April, we head out to the barn and hand shear the llamas/alpacas. (We will readily admit that we hire someone to shear the sheep. Chris attended a sheep shearing clinic at the University of Vermont but failed miserably. If you've ever seen a sheep sheared, you can assume that there is direct proportion between how easy it looks and how good the shearer is.) We have a chute that helps to hold the animals in place for shearing. Though some people use electric shears, we shear our animals with a large pair of scissors. It's less stressful for the animal, and based on our farm size, it's quite practical. 

Once the sheep and alpaca are sheared, we typically pick through the fleeces to pull out any foreign material that we can before shipping. With the llamas though, there is an extra step.

Some llamas have a two layer coat. This means that in addition to the coat you see when looking at them, they also have a soft down undercoat, with coarser guard hair that pokes through the top coat. This guard hair provides the animals with extra protection against the elements. Because of its coarseness, it doesn't feel very good against the skin, so it's removed. This is accomplished by slowly pulling it from the fleece. Since the hair is much longer than the down, it's not terribly hard, just time consuming. When done, we keep the down, and discard the hair (though many people use it for making rope).

Cleaning/Carding

Once the fiber is all packed up, we ship it off to a mill to be cleaned and carded. It is washed to remove the oils present in the fiber (wool is much more oily than llama / alpaca fiber), as well as to remove the remaining organic material. Finally it is sent through a carding machine which disentangles the fiber to make it more suitable for spinning.

Spinning

Dyeing

Dyeing can occur either before or after spinning. Chris does all of our dyeing in small batches and much of it is experimental, so we always end up with new and interesting colors.

Knitting

Yarn in hand, Leigh then does all of the knitting. Depending on what she feels like knitting, she could be putting together a hat, a shawl, a scarf, booties, or even a blanket or two! 

Felting 

Some of the hats and purses we make are felted. Felting is basically an agitation step that forces all of the fibers to interlock with each other. Finer fibers make better felts as the fibers have more ability to intertwine.

Ship It!

Those are the basic steps, so once complete, we either package up our items and ship them to our various customers or save them for the craft exhibitions that we attend throughout the fall / winter season.