Shearing is an annual ritual here at the farm. With sheep it would seem like a given. Sheep=Wool. So every year around the end of February we get all our sheep together, hire our Aussie shearer Dwayne, crank up the tunes and get ready for a long day of hard work but a lot lots of fun. Last year Dwayne taught me how to shear. To the perfect shearer it is a movement of 53 strokes that pulls the wool off in one big piece called a fleece. This fleece is then strategically thrown onto a special table and picked clean or at least close to clean. From there, the fleece is put into giant brown bags, kind of like big potato sacks. There are two ways of doing this. 1 is putting them into the bag by hand, or foot i suppose. Int he bottom picture on the left you can see my boyfriend Brendan stuffing a woolsack. Its a tough job but he makes it look gooood. lol. The other way is with a hydraulic press that is annually manned by my Grandpa. this pushes the fleeces into the bag at high pressure so we can get many many more fleeces into the bag. Now you would think that wool is kinda cool. We should be able to sell it at a great price but you would be wrong. Slowly the sell rate for wool is gaining because the consumer market is liking the idea of a natural and organic material instead of synthetic. But in the last few years, after we sell all our wool, we haven't had enough money to pay for the shearer!
Once the wool gets to the wool mill (Yes there is such a thing, there is a big one at Carstairs, where we sell our wool often) the wool is washed and cleaned fully then spun into yearn (then into mats or clothing) or carded into a filler (For douvets or bed pads). Then that's when you can buy it for your home!
