Category: Wool

Is there a huge markup on yarn? Why is yarn so expensive often?

Sometimes. But mostly, not.

I had a little adventure into yarn production some years ago. I purchased the fleece, had it spun as a worsted-spun 4-ply, and wound into undyed hanks.

As I recall, the fleece, a rare-breed Galway (my Unique Selling Point (USP)) was £11 a kilo. I bought 10kg – £110.

I drove it to a spinning mill – around £200 by ferry plus 500miles petrol. Total in the region of £600 – lucky it was a multipurpose trip…

The mill charged £56 per returned kilo. I got 60-ish 100g hanks back, so about £336.

The resulting yarn was shipped to me at a cost of about £60.

>> 110+(600/2)+336+60=806 (travel costs halved because it was a multipurpose trip)

>> 806/60= 13.43333333

So, just to break even, I’d have to sell each hank for £13.50. And that’s without a ballband, gauge testing, packaging and posting, Etsy listing and selling fees, etc. A 50% markup would bring it to just over £20. And you’ll find, as you look around, that £20 is an average price for a hank of good-quality 4-ply yarn with enough yardage to make a pair of socks.

But that’s a profit of only £405 – half as much as I’d need to repeat the process the following year.

Rare-breed Galway sheep with characteristic top-knot.

A non-profit business, just bringing attention to the lovely Galway, would need to charge £30 per undyed 100g skein – and that leaves nothing to plough back into a breeding programme, fodder, housing, veterinary bills, or my time and expenses! Salary? Don’t make me laugh…

I could, of course, have shipped the fleece instead of delivering it, at about £100 for the 10kg. I could have gone for a less expensive woollen treatment, costing a mere £52 per returned kilo – and if you think that’s still expensive, you should watch this:

Fleece processing is intensive both manually and mechanically. Neither the expertise nor the machinery (£1mn startup costs) comes cheap!

I could even have used any old fleece at half the price, instead of rare-breed Galway – but that would have eliminated my USP. I’d have to find some other way of adding value, such as hand-dyeing. Sadly, while I can do and enjoy dyeing… I’m not really ‘valuable’ as a dyer. I have no unique vision that allows me to create exquisite colourways that are Art in the skein, like my neighbour EweMomma does:

Skein of hand-painted yarn in shades of pink. green, purple and yellow.
Ewemomma hand-painted yarn.

I’d produce plain solid colours like wot i dun ere:

7 hanks of yarn dyed in solid maroon, red, salmon, burgundy, lime, turquoise and orange.
Sooooo boring. But at least I got a good R-O-Y range.

The way you need to look at fibrecrafts is as a hobby, like golf, wine-tasting, or astronomy. A decent golf club can set you back £100 – and you’ll need more than one, plus balls, tees, club fees and funny trousers. Wine tastings can be as little as £30 – for a couple of hours, and you don’t even get to drink the wine! Astronomy costs – are astronomical. But a decent yarn is lovely and squishy in the hank, provides hours of knitting pleasure, and an end product that – with a little care – will last 1,000 years…

Egyptian sock fragments, c. 1000–1400CE, with colourwork geometric designs in black, white and blue cotton.
Egyptian sock fragments, c. 1000–1400CE. From L to R: Textile Museum, ca. 1000 – 1200 AD; Victorian & Albert Museum, ca. 1100 – 1300 AD; Textile Museum, ca. 1300 AD

Quora linky.

Is wool production a profitable business?

Nope.

For many sheep farmers, it’s not worth the cost of shearing their sheep, so they sell them as lambs for meat.

All fleeces in the UK – except for ‘hobby farming’ flocks of <6 sheep (more if rarebreed) – must be sold to the British Wool (formerly the Wool Marketing Board).

In the best-case scenario, you break even. Small wonder, then, that farmers who do shear just bury the fleece on their land.

If you DO want to have a crack at making money,

  • consider a smallish number of rarebreed sheep, raised organically and treated like pet dogs (baths, brushing, housing, coats, etc.) – I recommend the longwool breeds such as Wensleydale, Teeswater, Leicester Longwool or Lincoln Longwool.
  • learn to shear them yourself – it’s not hard if you’re reasonably active.
  • learn to grade the fleece – again, not difficult, just a bit smelly and poopy if you forgot the baths and coats.
  • learn to prep and spin the wool yourself – not hard, but trickier than it looks – or find a reasonably-priced mini-mill which will take small batches, e.g., Griffiths Mill, The Border Mill, Diamond Fibres, or The Natural Fibre Company.
  • learn to dye your own yarn – possibly the most straightforward part of the process, but also the most artistic: how’s your colour sense?
  • sell the yarn for £20-£30 a 50g/100g ball/skein/hank, as rarebreed, single-origin, locally-sourced/low carbon footprint, organic, handspun, handpainted (delete as appropriate).

You should make enough money to stay in business, and maybe enough to buy those sheep coats.

Quora linky.

Can I make a living from selling wool and from knitting?

From knitting? Almost certainly not.

I was a maths teacher, and collected some data for a Functional Maths project I ran with low-ability students. One heavily-cabled Aran sweater I made took me 60 hours (I’m a fast knitter. It was complicated) of knitting time, and about 10 hours of swatching, planning and finishing.

  • At the current minimum wage in the UK (£8.21 an hour), I would need to sell that sweater for £574.70 to compensate me for my working time, plus the cost of the yarn (just over £50, so pretty cheap).
  • However, I am NOT a ‘minimum-wage knitter’, I am an expert AND an artist/artisan. In my professional career, I routinely charged £25–50 per hour for private work. Applying that to my knitting, that raises the minimum sale price of the sweater to £1,750-3,500, plus yarn costs.
  • I knit that particular sweater for my husband: people regularly complimented him on it, and, on learning his wife had knitted it, asked if I’d knit one for them – – – – for £20. INCLUDING the yarn…

From selling wool? If you mean running a yarn shop, people do, and can be quite successful. However,

  • my local non-artisanal yarn shop also sells cheap crappy acrylic yarn, fabric, supplies for sewing, embroidery, quilting, paper crafts, art (painting, sculpture, etc), and just about anything else you can imagine. The owner makes a modest living.
  • a posher yarn shop stocks only locally-sourced wool and mohair. The owner is independently wealthy, only opens part-time, and uses her profits to promote local charities. She does do a mean hot chocolate and gluten-free cookies, so I spend far too much time there.
  • A friend and neighbour who’s a yarn-dyer does make a living by selling online and through trade fairs all over Europe, and teaching, and giving talks, and Patreon, and ‘moonlighting’ as an accountant.

From producing wool? Eh. The suppliers of the posh yarn shop that I’ve met produce yarn as a way of offsetting the cost of keeping their animals. One also keeps milk goats and sells the milk, another keeps Jacob sheep for meat, skins and wool. They also teach, dye, design, etc.,etc. They’re not getting rich, and might not be making very much money at all once the accounts are balanced. I once had a go at buying fleece and getting it spun for sale: I did make a profit, but I had to sell the undyed yarn for nearly £20 a 100g hank – and the profit wasn’t enough for me to buy more fleece to spin the following year 😦

Almost everyone I know of who is making a living off fibre crafts is not just a dyer, or a designer, or a spinner, or… They’re a sample knitter and a dyer and a designer and a spinner and a teacher and a vlogger/blogger/podcaster and a magazine contributor and a book author and a photographer and and and. I knit, design, and teach, and it just about covers the cost of my yarn.

Quora linky.

Is knitting clothes yourself more environmentally friendly?

No, unless you are shearing your own organically-raised free-range sheep with manual clippers, prepping and spinning your own wool, and are happy to only have clothes in the natural colours that come off your sheep. Or, if you’re bartering your organically-grown vegetables (or whatever) with a neighbour within walking distance who does.

If you want to use plant fibres, even those grown, prepped and spun by you or your neighbour, then you’re pretty much straight-up damaging the environment from the get-go. Cotton is hellaciously bad for the environment, linen may be somewhat less damaging – though your neighbours will be less willing to barter with you after you’ve filled the air with the stench of rotting flax plants.

I hope I don’t have to explain why synthetic fibres are bad for the environment.

I don’t, do I?

You can minimise the environmental impact by buying your yarn from local producers, and looking particularly for yarns that have been dyed with natural, or at least minimally damaging dyes: for example, vinegar can be used to fix dye in animal fibres, though the colours are likely to fade over time. You can also mitigate the damage by reusing yarn from old garments.

However, by making your own clothes, whether knit, crocheted, or woven and sewn, you are helping the environment. For example, you will probably make better-quality clothes, which will last much longer than Primark’s finest. If you do somehow manage to wear out a home-sewn tweed jacket, much of the material can be repurposed for quilts, children’s clothes, and as patches for other clothes – avoiding landfill, and saving you money in the long run. In addition, fabrics like wool don’t require regular washing, so you’re cutting down on the water, electricity and detergent you use: if it gets muddy, just let it dry and then brush it off; if it gets sweaty, hang it in a draught for an hour or so; if it gets soaked, lay it flat near a heat source. A couple of sheep will keep your lawn down with less impact on the environment than a lawnmower.

And so forth. It’s about finding a balance.

Quora linky.

Why is synthetic wool better than natural wool?

It isn’t.

Synthetic yarn (NB: NOT ‘wool’) is sometimes cheaper, and some people with allergies to wool or lanolin find it safer to wear next to the skin. Vegans also tend to prefer it.

There are two basic types of synthetic yarn: petroleum-based, such as acrylic or nylon, and plant-based, such as rayon or cellulose.

Petroleum-based yarns, as you might imagine, are not eco-friendly or renewable. They are often flammable if not treated with kemikalzzzz, melting onto your skin. Every time they are washed, they lose tiny microfibres which make their way into the oceans, just like those banned micro-beads in cleansers. Plus, being basically plastic, they degrade like plastic bags: good news for archaeologists, not so good for the environment.

Plant-based fibres will bio-degrade, but the process of creating them can be polluting. For most, the process involves blending the plant material into slush and extruding a thin fibre from that slush, which uses electricity. The process also involves the dreaded kemikalzzz, some of which are genuinely nasty. There’s also significant waste which needs to be dealt with, preferably not by dumping it in a nearby river, which does happen too.

Other, more ‘natural’ plant fibres are not much better. Cotton is famously bad for the environment, both in the growing and the processing. Linen requires the flax plant to be rotted under water for a period of time, then washed repeatedly to extract the phloem (IIRC: it might be xylem, or both). On my family farm, there is a stream-fed pond we call the linsteep, where my ancestors performed this task. It’s now an amusement park for our ducks, and a handy watering-hole for our cattle, but when it was in use, we – and our down-stream neighbours – had to drive our animals to other water sources. The process for making hemp yarn was similar.

Wool is renewable, bio-degradable, non-flammable, need not use the genuinely nastier chemicals in processing (check out the suint method – the residue can be used as a natural fertiliser, which apparently works wonders on tomatoes), all while the sheep mows and fertilises your lawn, provides milk which can be made into ice cream, lanolin for your beauty products, and in the end cuddly sheepskins and yummy meat. Plus, wool is warmer, waterproof, dyes easily with no more than food colouring and vinegar, and when you’re bored with your sweater, you can felt it into pot-holders or cushion covers, or cut it up without unravelling to patch other clothes or make new ones:

Katwise Rainbow Magic coat, made from recycled wool sweaters.

Quora linky.

Does all wool come from sheeps?

Sheep, not sheeps. It’s one of those weird English words that doesn’t take a ‘s’ when plural.

Technically, yes-ish. Wool is a winter undercoat which, in primitive sheep, is shed in spring. Most modern sheep have been bred to not shed their wool, although the genes do still exist in commercial breeds and one can often see sheep looking a bit ragged at this time of year, with clumps of wool coming away from their summer coat.

Not all sheep grow wool, and other members of the Caprinae family, such as Cashmere and Angora goats, do. Indeed, the undercoat of Angora goats, mohair, is so routinely sold as ‘wool’ – particularly in suits – that there’s no point in differentiating it now.

Confusingly, Angora rabbits, source of Angora fibre, not only have the name of the goat that does produce wool which is called mohair, but were originally known as wooled rabbits. (It’s also possible to spin Angora cat hair, but enough already).

So, there’s no reason why the undercoat of other animals cannot be called wool, too. However, in practice, these other fibres tend to take the name of the animal it comes from: alpaca, llama, guanaco, vicuna, camel, yak, bison, chinchilla, mink, possum. And finally, qivuit, from the musk-ox.

But if the fibre is from a plant, like cotton or linen, or is synthetic such as nylon or polyester, it is NOT wool, and I will get very sharp with you if you call it wool.

Quora linky.

What can you do with wool that varies in thickness without it looking messy?

These yarns are usually called thick-and-thin yarns, or occasionally slubby yarns, though the latter usually means the yarn is largely of one thickness with frequent, irregular ‘bobbly’ bits.

Thick-and-thin yarns come in various weights from thread to super-bulky. You can knit any pattern that uses the same weight and gauge as your thick-and-thin yarn. This is because you will be using the appropriate size of needle. The ‘thin’ bits might look a little lacey, or the ‘thick’ bits may look bunched up, but your fabric will even itself out over all.

Thick-and-thin yarns are particularly good at injecting life and movement into otherwise dull and plain knitting. They transform boring stretches of stockinette or garter stitch into an interesting-looking fabric. Some people love the rustic, homespun, home-made look they give to otherwise ordinary garments, and they certainly liven up a basic scarf or cowl. They’re also much loved by independent hand-dyers for their more exotic variegated dyes, so you may well have a virtually unique item at the end of your knitting.

Is there a way to reverse shrinkage of a wool garment that has accidentally been in the drier?

Yes-ish.

It’s possible to reverse shrinking, to a certain extent. The type of garment shrunk matters, as does the degree of shrinkage. The garment is, however, unlikely to recover to its former glory. The simpler the garment, the better the outcome: for example, a scarf or shawl will stretch out better than a glove or jumper. In general, it’s not worth trying this on baby garments: put them on one of the baby’s dolls or teddies instead.

The technique involves wetting the garment thoroughly and stretching it. You’ll need a lot of muscle power to do the stretching – you are, after all, tearing the bonds between the fibres that have snagged together. The garment should be pinned out at its maximum dimensions and be allowed to dry naturally. It’s sometimes possible to repeat this procedure for improved results, but the downside is that the fibres will weaken, and you may tear holes in it.

If this fails, you could gift it to someone whom it will fit! Alternatively, it could be cut up for use as placemats, cushions, or even blankets.

If a sweater is 100% wool, how do you wash it?

Firstly, you need to know that wool garments do NOT need to be washed often. Hang them outside or beside an open window for a few hours after wearing – that’s all that’s needed mostly. Really: wool wicks off sweat and kills the BO bugs. Soiling can be scraped off carefully when dry, then shake out the garment and put it straight back on. For those particularly nasty stains, like red wine or tomato sauce, most can be soaked off on a very soapy solution followed if necessary with a rinse in a white vinegar solution. If any staining remains, you can reduce its visibility by gently plucking out some of the stained fibres. Never, ever use bleach on wool: it causes wool to melt and disappear.

So. Given that you only need to clean that pure wool suit or sweater every other month, you could consider getting it professionally cleaned. If, like me, even this small splurge sets your Scottish ancestors birling out of their graves to wail and groan at you of a night, you can hand-wash it on cool-ish water with a suitable wool washing agent (okay, okay Great-uncle Hamish, back in your box) or the cheapskate option, shampoo – for dry hair if possible. If your deceased Irish granny is giving you nocturnal earache about how she didn’t work three jobs to scrimp and save so that her grandchildren could wash their clothes by hand, you could use the wool programme on your washing machine. Again: really. Mine have survived front-loaders and top-loaders.

Then, the issue is the drying thereof. Unless the wool is “superwash” – it should say on the label – no tumble driers. Instead, roll the garment in a bath towel and squeeze, don’t wring the excess water out. Lay it out flat and pulled into shape and leave it somewhere airy and/or warm (but not in direct sunlight, or close to a heat source).

Quora linky.

Why do we use sheep wool?

Because painting ourselves blue turned out to be a tad redundant?

Because somewhere along the route out of Africa, we figured out that wearing skins meant a dead animal who couldn’t provide us with milk, whereas wearing fleece meant a living animal AND more baby animals who could provide fleece and milk?

Because it’s insulating, waterproof, fireproof, and easy to manipulate into textiles?

Because a renewable resource is better than polluting the planet with plastic fibres derived from non-renewable fossil fuels?

Quora linky.