Create using 100% of your own, 100% of our fibre or blend it with our extensive collection of wool & speciality fibres. We can even source rare and unique fibres including animal, plant & synthetic options.

We regular processes wool, cashmere blends, alpaca, silk blends, bamboo and a whole host of creative fibres including rose fibre, rare breeds & bio-degradable nylon.

Before the wool goes anywhere near our spinning frames we need to clean it. Scouring is the technical name for washing. We use a detergent to cut through grease (like washing up liquid, but more industrial!) and once it is clean, we rinse and dry it. The washing removes vegetable matter, lanolin and any other things that have been on the fleece.

Think of this like brushing your hair.  The clean fleece will be all tangled and will still have bits of grass and all sorts in from when it was on the sheep.  Carding encourages the larger pieces to drop out along with some of the coarse fibres. Sometimes small bits of grass seed stay if they are particularly well stuck.  Carding makes a web of fibre which can be quite bulky, this makes carded products very good for felting, stuffing and woollen spinning.  Our carders can produce carded slivers and batts.

Once the fibre is carded we run it through our combs; they work in the same way as a hair comb expect they have many, many more teeth and are obnoxiously loud!  These clever machines align all of the wool in parallel and in doing so remove any little bits of remaining vegetable matter as well as any coarser fibres.  The resulting product is known as a top.  Our combs have different teeth we can swap in and out (like dentures!) so if we are working with coarser fibres such as Herdwick they won’t remove all of the characterful kemp.

This is the fun bit. If you’re having extra fibre added such as another wool or a silk we use our gills to blend the fibres together. The gills take 8 tops (combed by the comb) and puts them together in one top; our team then split this into 8 again and feed this back through the machine until the fibres are well mixed.

Not all tops are made equal and in order to get a super yarn you need to make sure they are even in thickness. Some yarns need to be spun from a thinner top and this next stage is really important for this. The tops go through our auto-leveller which is a rather clever piece of kit; it makes sure the tops are the same thickness all the way along and we can adjust it to get the right number of grams per metre. After this the tops are now pencil roving and are coiled into cans (or drums) ready for the spinning frame. They’re pretty delicate so we have to make sure they go into the drums smoothly so that the spinning frame can pull them out easily.

We’re finally here! It’s taken a bit of work but we’re now ready to spin a yarn. Our spinning frames are very clever, they pull the pencil roving up and over the back of themselves and draft it out so it is even thinner, they then put a twist into it and wind it onto a tube for us. The mill staff can adjust every aspect of the spinning frames to make thicker and thinner yarns with higher or lower twist depending on what they’re being used for.

The spinning frames make a single strand of yarn, and most of our yarns consist of two or more strands so we need to twist them together. The plying frame takes the tubes and twists up to 6 ends together, once it has done this it puts it back on tubes for us (very kind!) so that we can start finishing it.

This is one of the more labour-intensive parts of yarn making.  Our finishing team have an eye for detail, dextrous fingers and a fantastic sense of humour.  They take the tubes of wool and put the yarn into whatever form people have ordered. Sometimes it is wound onto 1kg cones, sometimes it is put into hanks (each one hand tied) and sometimes it is put into balls (each one hand labelled).  They then pack these into stock boxes or into packs ready to go on the shelf for sale

While all this is going on we work with you on the branding of your products.  From logo and label design to wording and point of sale we work with you to make the product your own.  By the time the yarn reaches the finishing stage your branding is complete and the finishing department can apply your own labels to the yarn.