Mill news and travel plans

It’s nearly March and spring is coming to the San Juans. As I drive the rounds to visit our flocks wintering on various knobs of high ground across the valley, I spy little spumes of plum blossom amongst the evergreens. Daffodils are nodding their yellow heads in the sunny patches at the end of our driveway, and the naturalized clusters beneath the oaks are fattening their buds to open in the next few days. Gusty winds are still lashing the islands, and while we had bright weather at the farm most of today, the northern hills saw snow and now it’s slinging down hail and flurries. All in all, I’m glad we’re not lambing for another six weeks!

Driftwood Spyhop and daffodils

This weekend we’ll begin shearing, starting with the boy band and the earliest lambing group. It’s exciting to get the spring clip underway and start to make yarn plans for the year. Our spinning operation has moved from Abundant Earth Fiber Mill on Whidbey Island to Skagit Woolen Works in Mount Vernon, with Lydia mentoring Jessica and Anna to take the reins. I’m so grateful to Lydia for all the teaching, cheerleading, and friendship she has provided to help make San Juan Woolworks a reality, and while I’m sad that she wasn’t able to find a new commercial lease to keep her mill running, I’m excited for her new plans. Our relationship will continue as we house some of her washing equipment at our farm and try to get our arms around a more efficient on-farm scouring process this year. And I’m beyond thrilled that the dream team at Skagit Woolen Works, who already know our fiber so intimately, will be stepping in to take over the spinning.

We’ve seen so many small mills close, and I always feel equally bad for the operators’ having to abandon a dream and for the farmers up a creek without their services. Without Skagit’s big YES to this daunting new chapter, we’d have had to start from scratch to redesign all of our yarns at a mill farther away, where we’d probably have had to ship all the fleece to them. I can’t even describe to you how enormous and disconsolate a tantrum I’d have thrown at the prospect. It takes YEARS to build a solid relationship with a mill; all the while they’re working to understand your flock and fiber goals so they can produce a consistent product that your customers will clamor for, and on the shepherding end you’re honing your management to grow a better and more consistent quality of fleece based on the mill’s feedback about each clip. That we’ll be able to seamlessly keep making yarn this year is a huge freaking deal for our tiny business. Bottomless thanks to our partners who recognize that collaborative efforts are more sustainable and resilient than competitive ones.

A swatch of our Zephyr yarn with a feather from a northern flicker, one of my favorite residents of the farm

Speaking of collaboration amongst wool businesses, on March 9 I’ll be in Portland for the Rose City Yarn Crawl! Ritual Dyes invited me down for a pop-up in their lovely store, which I’ve never gotten to visit in person. I’m bringing Spyhop in five colors—one is a very limited edition batch with two plies of white and one of Sailcloth; sometimes Lydia sends me these little surprises of 20-odd skeins to use up leftovers and they are always a pure delight—and plenty of Zephyr, Grey Haven, and Luff. If I can get a few more skeins of Thistledew Special and Haven into the dyepot in time, I will, but eep, it’s coming up fast and we have a lot to do around the farm, including a lot of work on our farmhouse addition. (We made wool insulation, people! Skagit Woolen Works took our lower-grade Cheviot fleeces and made us gigantic batts sprayed with boric acid for pest repulsion, and we stuffed them right into our walls! How cool is that?)

Homegrown wool insulation batts—not tested for R value, so we are using Havelock Wool for the parts that need to pass inspection, but these are making some of our existing walls a lot cozier!

Come see us if you possibly can; I love having the chance to catch up with Portland friends after all these years!