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Wovember 2012
It is already half way through Wovember 2012 and we have realised that all has gone quiet on the J&S blog front recently. So to contribute our little bit to this magnificent month we thought we would give you a little sneaky peek behind the scenes here to show you where all your wonderful wool comes from. We start off in the wool-store, which could be described as the hub of Shetland's wool industry with more than 700 local crofters delivering their wool - ranging from bundles of a few kilos to trucks full with a few tonnes in some cases - through our big green doors. We then sort through the bags, fleece by fleece, to separate them into the different grades and natural colours with the finest being used to make fine lace and the toughest for durable wool carpets. The wool is then squashed into bales by our trusty old baler ready to be shipped and scoured, carded, combed, spun and dyed into the cushion filling, combed tops and lace and yarn that we send off to you. Some of it comes back to us transformed into beautiful rugs, carpets, duvets and even the life-changing Vi-Spring beds. We sent off our last load of wool for 2012 yesterday which has left room in the main store to clear out the coloured wool-store and sort each coloured fleece into the different grades, ready to be sent away in the final load of this year's wool season - usually in April - and processed into all of our natural, undyed products. This final 12th shipment will bring this year's total to over 240 tonnes of wool: a total which is usually greeted with a look of amazement from anyone who hears it. When the products finally arrive back here after their long transformation they take pride of place in our shop that is joined onto the wool stores where they first became part of J&S as raw wool. The shop was expanded in 2010 to make it three times its original size and give all of our treasured woolly products room to show off. It is now much-loved by knitters who can rummage around, comparing and contrasting colours to create their very own Shetland Wool knitwear. The shop also doubles up as the mail-room where we make up, package and send out orders from all over the world. This makes it a very busy place every morning until our postie comes just after 12 to take away the parcels. However, we love making up the little woolly bundles so thank you to each and every one of you who has ordered from us and helped support Shetland's wool industry. I just thought I'd end with an image of what makes this all possible. The humble Shetland Sheep with its world-beating wool in its wild, exposed habitat that makes it all so magical.
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Sheep Carousel by Kate Davies
We've been impatiently waiting for our postie to bring us a whole load of Sheep Carousel patterns. Well now they're here! This is the latest in a series of sheepy designs by Kate Davies. Kate is dedicated to the British wool industry and her designs celebrate and support native breeds. That's why we love her Shetland sheep collection - Sheep Heid, Rams & Yowes and now the Sheep Carousel. We especially love this new one because every time we see it we think of plinky plonky fairground music. There's no way this tea cosy won't make you smile (especially in the middle of this rather grey summer).
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Unst and Harrogate
The prize winning coloured Shetland Sheep at the very wet Unst show last Saturday.We're off to Harrogate for the British Wool Weekend this weekend, so come and say hello if you're around. Hopefully be back with lots of photos from the show - yay!x
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The Cunningsburgh Show
A mammoth photo post of the Cunningsburgh Show this Wednesday. 1.Entrance to the Wool tent 2, 3, 4.Oliver's fleece judging skills put to the test again 5, 6, 7. Some prize winning Shetland Sheep 8. Charlie Simpson and a herring feast 9. Cool footgear and a woolly dog 10, 11. More beautiful Shetland Sheep posing for the camera 12. Tractor love 13, 14. Elizabeth Johnson of Shetland Handspun's beautiful things 15 and 16. Yummy wool in the sun (which decided to make an appearance after weeks of grey, woop woop). x
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seaweed
Shetland Sheep spend their days ambling around the coastline eating heather and seaweed. This diet, along with the weather conditions, is what gives the wool it's lustre, fineness and bounce. We've said this all before but we thought it was about time we paid homage to the humble seaweed (not so much the weather, that can wait for some other time... or maybe never).x
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The Middle
Yesterday Oliver and Derek made the first move into the aptly named 'Middle store', which is tucked between our Wool Store, where the raw wool is dropped off by our suppliers, and the yarn store, where we sell yarn and post out woolly parcels. They'll now start the mammoth task of individually hand sorting all of the coloured Shetland wool. They will go through every single fleece (all 7,000 of them or thereabouts) and separate the finer grades (for example the wool that comes from the sheep's neck) used in hand-knit yarns, knitwear and blankets from the coarser wool (for example from the back legs) which we put in our 100% Shetland Wool carpets so that nothing is wasted, and our suppliers get the very most for their wool.The contents of our middle store is really quite precious. Of the 250,000kilos of Shetland Wool that we deal with each year (which represents over 80% of Shetland's total wool clip), only about 10,000kilos of this is coloured wool. We give our suppliers a premium for their coloured wool to encourage the breeding of coloured sheep. I was talking with one of our suppliers just the other day and he was delighted that he'd managed to get a coloured ram, and is looking forward to coloured lambs this spring. So, first hand evidence that this work is paying off! Fingers crossed for a very colourful wool season in 2011...1 The wall 2 The middle store 3 The inroad4 The man (6' 4" Oliver)
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