Shearing

Shearing is essential for ensuring the welfare of sheep - it removes the heavy, sweaty coat before the hot summer months.

For sheep, it's just like getting a haircut. It causes almost no stress or worry, and the highly skilled shearers work swiftly but carefully.

Grading

After shearing, the wool arrives at Garthenor Farm in tightly packed sacks, known as wool sheets. At grading, we assess four separate characteristics - Breed, Colour, Age and Openness (if a fleece is felted, or cotted).

This initial sorting gives us the basis to pay the farmer and group together similar wool types for storage.

Sorting

The vast majority of British wool will go straight into production after grading. However, given the spectacular variety of wools within a single fleece, there is no substitute for sorting each individual fleece before scouring.

At this stage, we are assessing: Fibre Strength (known as soundness), Fineness (the diameter of the fibres), Staple Length, Crimp, Vegetable Matter, Lustre, Yield, and Shade.

Scouring

Hot, steamy, pungent air hits you in the face with the smell of wool as you reach the scourers. Here, lanolin, sweat (known as suint), muck and most of the vegetable matter (hay and straw from the fleece) are washed from the fleece in a series of warm water baths.

After washing and drying, the wool is tightly packed in bales, weighing up to 350kg (770lbs)!

Blending & Carding

The tangled mass of clean fibres following scouring start to get sorted, initially during blending, and then during carding.

Huge drums coated (or clothed) with metal wire teeth tease and open the wool, passing through the carder until dozens of slivers of wool are taken off the other end. This is the first time our wool looks a bit like a yarn, but there's no strength at all - twist needs to be added.

Spinning

We're finally making a yarn! Cairngorm, like most of our woollen spun yarns is spun on an industrial revolution era spinning mule. These are famed for their exceptionally even, consistent spinning. Most have long since been replaced with faster spinning frames, but up in New Lanark, Scotland, the unmistakable clatter and whirr of the mule lives on.

After this step, we have a single ply - for Number 1 & Cairngorm, they're ready for their final steps, but for our plied yarns, they need to be twisted.

Dyeing

All of the dyes used to add colour to our yarns are fully certified organic - meaning no harsh chemicals, heavy metals or other nasties that can harm people, animals or the environment.

We choose to hank dye - this gives the fibres more room to relax, rather than introducing the pigments whilst under tension, resulting in a softer, more open yarn.

Once dyed, the skeins are backwound onto big cones for more efficient packing for transport back to the farm.

Skeining

Now back at Garthenor Farm on great big cones, our yarn is ready to be skeined, or reeled. We use a modern, digital machine that can wind 24 skeins at a time - a bit quicker than the single-skein winder we started with!

This mesmerising machine crosses the yarn back and forth to keep an even tension and consistent length for each skein.

2nd Scour

Through dyeing, the yarn will often be slightly tense, and won't have bulked up fully.

Once we've skeined the yarn, it's in for its second wash. Our soft, Welsh spring water bubbles up at the top of the farm, and is the secret to bulking and relaxing our yarns, allowing them to breathe. The transformation at this step is stunning - from an oily, firm yarn into the gorgeous skeins we sell.

Noddle & Label

At the end of this drawn out process, the final steps are to twist the skeins ready for sale - known as noddling, and slip on our label.

The yarn loop on the label of each skein is so that once you're knitting, you can tie a little end of yarn through the loop to keep in your knitting book.