Hefted Hebridean Wool

I love wool: the smell, the texture and the fact it grows on the animals I care for. Gathering my flock together for routine checks always ends with me spending time appreciating the various types of fleece on each sheep. Trying to choose my favourite fleece from luxurious, long dark staples to the crimped and interesting, involves sinking my hand deep into the fleece on their back, giving me a hint of the warmth to come. The woolly, lanolin smell increases the longer the flock are corralled together in the fank, as their body heat encourages the scent to rise upwards. It is a pleasure to stand amongst them.

The beginning of the journey for our wool is marked by the relief on the sheep’s face when we remove their woolly coat during the height of the summer months. Once shorn, the Hebrideans have a well fitting, dense, black velvet coat , exposing their body contours for the first time in a year. Strangely, they now look like goats. The relief on their faces quickly changes to bewilderment as they try to figure out why they are now in a field filled with goats!

Alongside plant fibre, wool has been spun into textiles for 1000’s of years. Despite new technologies, the rudiments of fibre production, involving twisting and plying to strengthen the finished yarn, is unchanged. I send the fleeces on a journey to the north of England, the heartlands of Britain’s textile industry, to be scoured and carded, a process which removes the dirt, grime and excesses of lanolin from their fleece, and prepares it for spinning. Once spun, our cones of Hebridean wool return home to Carry Farm, like well trained sheep hefted to their hill.

Our Hebrideans just keep on giving every year, and as the colour of their fleece slowly modifies as they age with increasing amounts of grey, so too does the subtle hues of the dark yarn we produce. The Hayshed Gallery has 50 gram hanks and 1 kg cones of Hebridean yarn for sale, alongside textiles made from the yarn in the studio at Carry Farm.