With my current project at university I've been looking into the production of wool and its sustainability.
So from this i decided to visit a wool mill in Yorkshire to see how it is all made and what processes go into its production.
There are only a few traditional wool mills left in the UK as people aren't educated enough in the benefits of buying and using wool so therefore the use of wool has lowered considerably.
People are not just looking for the cheapest thing on the shelf rather than the quality and sustainability. Most of the UK's fleece from farmers is put onto Wool board where companies can buy the raw fleece for production, sadly a lot of our British wool goes to other countries and comes back as clothing to the UK but then do we really know what has been added to the wool itself??
On my visit Paul the owner showed me through all of the processes of what happens when they get the raw wool into the mills. They get the raw fleece from designers/ makers who want yarn for their crafts so Paul only charges them for his services of processing the wool.
The above image in when the raw fleece first comes into the wool it has to be sorted and graded for quality so that when the wool goes through the carder it doesn't break and make poor quality yarn.
After its all been sorted and graded it goes for the washing process.
The next step is to take the fleece and put it into the blending/carding machine where the fleece can be blended with other types of wool and where the carding begins to aline all the fibres in the fleece.
In the clip below you can see the fleece coming off the carding rollers and being put into the next part of the process, as you can see it comes out as tops, where all of the fibres have been aligned and blended.
watch this link for a clip:
It then gets put into the next machine which alines the fibres even more to make a good quality yarn.
Its then fed up several belts which then spins it slightly. This is shown in the clip below:
The next machine twists the wool and makes to the ply that you want anything from thin to chunky yarn
This machine below is where you can mix yarns and twist them together as shown here there is two creamy colour yarns being mixed with a brown yarn. Shown in the clip below:
The next step in the hank or skein the wool if it needs to be dyed they do not do this at the mill but some designers send it off somewhere else for this to be done, it then comes back to the mill where they put it back onto cones or ball it up.
That is all the processes that raw fleece goes through to become yarn and be used in knitting/ weaving etc
Below are some samples that Paul gave to me, these are all natural undyed wools, two of them are also from alpaca's.
I also asked Paul about what he thinks about sustainability of wool and this is what he had to say:
"From a sustainability point of view i think the problems are the education/teaching of the production methods with a combination of educating designers to use and source smaller batches of British fibre."
From visiting the wool mill its really helped me understand wool and different fibres a lot more and all the different uses that they have.
Its was really good to see all this first hand and see how it all works,as before i saw it all being made i didn't really think about what fibres i should be using, and now i think that its one of the most important things to think about before making something as British wool is such a sustainable product and should be used more in the fashion and interior world.
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