Wool: From Raw Fibre to Yarn
Knowing where my materials come from is really important to me. It’s why I try to work with other Scottish manufacturers wherever possible, as it makes it easier to visit and see the making processes, and of course supports my local industry.
It helps that Scotland is world renowned for its knitwear, and the lamb’s wool yarn I use is from the best spinner, Todd and Duncan. Todd and Duncan are in Kinross, on the banks of Loch Leven, a really picturesque setting that plays an important part in the process of spinning the yarn. I went to visit them recently, so I could show you the processes that go into making the yarn I use, as I want to be as transparent as possible within this small business of mine.
This isn’t my first visit, as I did a weeks placement with T&D while I was at university- but that was quite a while ago now! So it was great to be reminded of the processes, attention to detail and quality standards. That, and factory tours are a bit like Christmas for me, so I always feel excited and inspired by them.
The start of the process is the raw fibre. Above you can see the wool, which comes from Australia, and is 100% Responsible Wool Standard (RWS) certified. RWS ensures high standards of animal welfare (so the wool is mulesing free), and that farms have progressive land management ensuring soil health and biodiversity, among other things. T&D are working to become a RWS certified spinner too.
Even though I know how soft the lambswool is when I use it, as a raw fibre it feels incredible, and I couldn’t quite believe it was wool! T&D mostly spin cashmere, which is even softer, but feeling that raw wool fibre made me very happy that I’ve made a great choice for my designs. This definitely feels great against the skin.
First the wool gets wetted, and then it’s dyed, and then dried. The huge containers it gets dyed in are moved by a crane attached to the ceiling (something I didn’t get to see happen, but find quite fascinating to know anyway!).
Loch Leven plays an important part in this story. Todd and Duncan use water from the loch for washing and dying the fibre, so they have to ensure it is safe to return to the loch when they are finished with it. The loch is part of a nature reserve, so it’s especially important that no wildlife is harmed by the water. It’s a very good reason to use Global Organic Textile Standard approved dyes, and clean the water after use.
After being dyed, colours are blended together before spinning for melanges. Melange colours are really beautiful, as they’re not a solid colour but are made up of a very subtle mix of different shades which you only really see if you look very closely. For example, my Skye blanket scarf uses a beautiful blue melange, and quite a lot of the colours I use are made like this.
Above you can see a mix of colours in different proportions going into the blending machine, that will then mix them evenly together before spinning. There’s often one main shade that is then “seasoned” with small amounts of other colours. Here you can see mainly brown, with a mustard yellow and red in smaller proportions.
Seeing the colours they can choose from when creating new shades was one of my highlights I think. I loved this wall of colour samples! These get chosen in different proportions to make up a shade.
The factory also has a dye lab to create new shades, colour testing and sampling equipment. They can try out new shades in small, cost effective quantities (see below for an example), and also test each new colour batch for accuracy. T&D have extremely high standards when it comes to making sure new batches of a colour match the first, and each batch is tested and checked, and adjusted if necessary.
This is an example of how colours are used together to create a new shade.
The carding process is by far my favourite to see- although it was fairly hard to capture as the machines have protective walls around them. This is the stage where contamination is most likely to happen (although it almost never does), and machines have to be thoroughly cleaned between each colour.
You can see this is a melange shade, with flecks of different colour visible on the rollers at the start of the carding process.
The blended colours of wool get fed into the carding machines, where they are gentry rolled to straighten and align the fibres. It passes through a lot of rollers, getting finer each time. T&D have just turned down investment for new carding machines, which would have takes days off the time this process takes so as to maintain the quality. These old machines are slower but will create a better quality of yarn, as they don’t cut as much off the fibre length as the new machines. And quality is important- it affects how much the yarn will pill (bobble) for example, so every millimetre counts.
Just look at how fine the fibre coming off this roller is!
I love the constant consideration of the quality of the end product at every stage of the process.
The carded fibre gets passed over from one machine and into the next.
Here it is laid down very gently to start the next process.
You can start to see the fibre being separated into strands here. It then goes through a stage where it is shoogled (I can’t think of a better word, and it was so loud in the mill, and I was so busy just gaping in awe at these cool machines that I’ve forgotten what the right word is!) into a strand, and wound into the reels you can see below.
These reels are then taken up to the spinning section of the mill. In the image above, the reels are as far away from the spools they’re being wound on to as they can get- the machinery takes them back and forth. So when they are far away from the spools as above, they stop and allow twist to go into the yarn, and then the reels come forwards and the yarn is wound onto the spools.
Twist being added. Any time one of these very fine threads breaks, it gets tied back together by hand.
Six spools of yarn make up one cone of finished yarn. The joins are generally invisible.
Most of the yarn I use is a single ply, so the final stage is waxing it (the small blue-ish disks you can see are wax). If the yarn needs to get plied up, then this would be the final stage- plying and waxing it. My river pompom hats, beanies and visible mending kits use yarn that’s 2 ply for example.
I couldn’t visit the mill without also having a look at the loch, which really is right beside it. I’m wearing one of my Block scarves in Mist, made with beautiful grey melanges spun just meters away.