We are a wool spinning mill, so if you're looking to add value to your fleece, you've come to the right place! Most of the mill's work involves wool, but we also process alpaca, mohair and other fibres and depending on what, our customers want we often blend one with another. This is what we can do for you:

• We sort, scour and card your fleece before spinning it into the finished form you specify. It can be pure or blended and either wool or worsted which can be returned to you in balls, hanks or on cones;

• While natural colours are infinitely variable, our dye house can match any colour you choose;

• Every service offered by the mill is fully licensed for organic production by the Soil Association;

• All our customers are supported with advice to get the best and most appropriate products from their fibre;
• Where practical we arrange for the collection of the fleece; and

• We do all we can to reduce the company's impact on the environment recycling most of the waste we produce and keeping the remainder to a minimum. This means we work to get the highest yield from your fibre and low waste disposal costs help keep our prices down

Although the British Wool Marketing Board is the monopoly purchaser of wool from flocks of over five sheep, there are exceptions for minority and rare breeds and for those attenpting to add value to the fleece their flocks produce.

If you want us to process your fleece and are uncertain of the rules, we have an agreed letter with the BWMB that covers the legal ramifications. We specialise in fine, lustrous, coloured, rare and minority breed wool, and the BWMB supports what we do.

They have granted us a license and our Blacker Design and Blacker Yarns products are entitled to carry the British Wool logo. 

Over the last five years we have processed raw fleece from over 50 of the 60-odd breeds of sheep that are kept in the UK sometimes using material from two different breeds or by blending a single breed with alpaca, mohair or silk. Click here if you want to learn more about the sheep breeds and the different qualities of the various breeds.

Fleece and grease

Raw fleece is full of grease, dirt and sweat, less if the sheep have been grazing in the rain! The grease, or lanolin, helps protect the sheep from the wet. When we wash this out during scouring it results in some weight loss. Please speak to us if you are concerned about what you might lose, but remember you only pay for what you get back!

We considered recovering the lanolin, but the amounts are too small to make it worthwhile. Recovery is possible in larger scouring plants than ours, but because of pesticides, which bond to the lanolin molecules, it still needs special physical and chemical extraction.

Wool varies in length from 2.4 to 30 centimetres (1 to 12 inches) and in thickness from 11 microns to over 50. In most cases products made from wool of up to 30 microns are comfortable next to the skin, but anything thicker may feel prickly; so will products containing a high proportion of coarse hair (kemp).

Other attributes of wool relate to lustre, crimp and colour. A wool product can absorb up to 30% of its natural weight before it becomes saturated. Wool is also a natural fire retardant. To find out more about different kinds of wool and the sheep it comes from please go to our Meet the Animals section.

Some fibre is said to be anti-bacterial, but this is disputed. To find out more about the work being done in various international laboratories and the test certificates that are issued, look at the International Wool Textile Organisation web site.

Enquires about what we do are welcomed; we are not advocates of call centres or telephone button pressing, so you should quickly find a person to talk to.