Prize Winning Wool

While our Katahdon sheep make up the bulk of our flock, we do have a growing number of wool sheep. They are Border Leicesters, a British breed known both for their long wool and for their meat. At Namaste Farm, the wool is the focus. Our “woolies” have produced fleece that has won prizes at both the Tennessee Valley Fair and the Southeastern Animal Fiber Fair (SAFF). At this time we have 13 of them.

What makes the fleece special? If you happen to be a spinner, you know that fleece is judged by its fineness (measured in microns), staple length (length of the wool), and crimp (waves in a lock of wool). The fineness determines what you can make from the wool. The staple length determines how easy the wool is to spin, because wool that is too short or too long is almost impossible for a handspinner to use. The crimp determines whether the yarn spun from the wool can stretch and hold a shape.

Our sheep produce beautiful, crimpy locks ranging from 3 to 7 inches, which makes their wool very popular for hand spinning. The locks themselves can be used to make all kinds of fun crafts, like Santa’s beard at Christmas and doll hair, along with just decorative additions to knitted items and art yarn. As you can see, the wool has a fabulous crimp to it, again great for handspinning. The fineness of the wool depends not only on the breed, but the age of the animal, so our lambs’ wool is perfect for most knitted items.

We sell our wool by the fleece at various events like SAFF and the Tennessee Valley Fair. Recently, a fleece we sold via the Internet to a customer in Canada got rave reviews. It was great to see pictures of what she did with it, shown below. Her work is featured on Facebook on the Fiber Pusher Fairy page. Contact us if you are interested. We usually have fleece, roving and sometimes packages of locks for sale.