Our business development manager, Beki is regularly asked about fibre suitability and has written some helpful information and tips below.
Understanding Your Fibre’s Spinning Potential
Proper fleece selection and maintenance are essential for high-quality yarn, as contamination and poor handling significantly reduce value. Key practices for top-tier wool include separating belly and crutch parts during shearing, ensuring at least four months pass after pesticide treatments, and selecting for specific breed characteristics like fineness and lustre.
Why You Must Trust Your Fibre Mill
Your yarn is only as good as the raw fleece we start with.
Fellow fibre mills also highlight this universal truth in our industry. Not all sheep are made for yarn, and not all fleeces are suitable for processing into yarn.
Here is why trusting your mill’s advice on fibre suitability will save you time, heartbreak, and money.
The Reality of Processing Poor-Quality Fleece
When a fleece arrives very dirty, packed with vegetable matter (VM), or fibre that is too long or too short, processing it becomes a massive uphill battle. Even if the fleece holds sentimental value, forcing it through industrial machinery causes severe downfalls:
- You Pay for Waste: You pay set up fees based on incoming weight. After excessive skirting and washing, a poor fleece might only yield a 25% to 35% return in actual yarn. (Standard is c.60%)
- Production Nightmares: Weak, tender, or inconsistent fibres constantly break at the spinner. This results in wasted fibre on the floor and requires exhausting man-hours to babysit every single step of the process.
- Poor End Products: Machines need consistent, strong fibre to produce high-performance, sustainable yarn. Forcing a sub-par fleece through results in a weak yarn prone to pilling and shedding. If you are selling a weak or substandard yarn, you are less likely to get repeat business!
Why We Suggest Blends and Alternatives
When we look at a fleece and tell you it isn’t right for a specific project, we mean well. We want to save you money and ensure you get a valuable, viable, end product.
If your fleece isn’t perfect on its own, we might suggest:
- Different weight/spec: Sometimes we feel fibre may not be suitable for the weight/spec of yarn you have requested. If we recommend we spin to a heavier weight, this is so we can produce a good quality yarn, that you/we are proud of.
- Blending: Adding robust wool to improve memory, elasticity, and processing performance.
- Alternative End Uses: Downgrading heavily matted or felted fleeces to compost or tree mulch rather than spend money on processing.
Different Mills, Different Machinery
Every fibre mill is unique. If another mill successfully processed challenging fleece for you in the past, it is likely because they run entirely different equipment with different capabilities.
To understand just how much a mill’s setup dictates the final product, we highly recommend reading “Vanishing Fleece” by Clara Parkes. It beautifully explains how the exact same fibre can turn out completely different depending on the mill it is sent to.
Work With Your Mill!
We want to help you get the best possible value from your fleeces. Before your next shearing day, take the time to separate your belly and crutch wool, keep problematic fleeces isolated, and always listen when your mill offers a reality check on fibre suitability.