Our industry is hanging on by a thread. The textile industry cannot continue producing, manufacturing, and processing what it currently does. It is beyond unsustainable, its terminal.

It's been a few days since Wales’ largest wool festival and we’re unpacking the trailer so I thought I’d write up a little debrief too. I loved seeing you all of your faces and hearing about your projects - especially when they involve jumpers for hedgehogs!

As we round up earth week, we’re taking time to reflect on what we can all do better. We’ve put together a list of our top 5 ideas for helping our planet, so that we can all do a little bit better than we were yesterday.

Yesterday we spoke about the process of creating a yarn, and got as far as the woollen and worsted spinning to a single ply. Today, I’ll cover what we call the finishing process, from dyeing right through to labelling.

What goes in to making a great yarn? Healthy, happy sheep are crucial, as they grow the fibre. Beautiful machinery that carefully processes the fibre is essential too. The magic ingredient though is the people involved. Without the knowledge, skill and care of all of those in the industry, our yarn simply couldn’t exist. Here’s a peek at the story of our yarn.

To kick off Earth Week, I sat down with Sally, founder and managing director of Garthenor Organic (and also mum!) to get some insight into why she started the company, and what’s been the driving force behind building a sustainable, ethical and organic yarn company.

Something we’re super proud of here at Garthenor is how we package our orders. It's one thing to say we don’t use plastic packaging but it's quite another to have considered every tiny detail of how our products are packed up and sent home to you in the most eco-friendly way possible.

This week I’ve been on an adventure to the namesake of one of our most popular yarns... on Sunday I headed up to the Brecon Beacons with a few friends in tow for a 3-peaks, horseshoe shaped day out.

Here at Garthenor we’re delighted to announce that we've been nominated as Family Business of the Year by the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB). This means that we were judged against other businesses and placed as a finalist… we’re unbelievably proud.

A question we've faced for many years in the yarn industry: the yarn loop. Simply put, it's a little eyelet on your yarn label which you can thread an end of the yarn through, so as not to forget the colour, weight etc of the yarn you ordered.

Our local beach is the picturesque Poppit Sands - yes it really is as cute as it sounds! Our Mill is just 3 miles from the shore, making it our nearest (and dearest!) beach. We love that the sea seems to stretch until the end of the earth from Poppit, and that on a warm summer’s evening we can watch the sunset over the headland.

This week we've rounded up our UK stockists and compiled a great big list of them! We’ve got many more further afield but that's a blog post for another day. For now we’d just like to highlight our lovely local yarn stores from the country we call home.