Another one of our major projects for the summer: starting a business. As you can see in the picture, Trevor spins wool into yarn, which we hope to start selling by the middle of the summer. The wool he is currently spinning is a chemically died maroon color that he is using as his practice/warm-up wool. He is on his second skein. In the future, he will be spinning mostly un-dyed or naturally dyed wool yarn.
The wool we currently have (in various piles and bags about the house) comes from two sources. Some of it is from two Shetland rams and a llama-alpaca who inhabit a farm in Wisconsin. This wool comes to us unprocessed, and requires some attention before it can be spun. The picture below shows one of the five bags of wool we currently have from that farm, spread out on our basement floor:
Trevor has been picking out pieces of manure, straw, and other foreign matter. Next it will need to be washed and carded.
Other bags of wool we have obtained from a woman in South Dakota who washes, dyes, and cards wool from her own sheep, using natural dyes. Check out her website: http://www.colorbynaturesstudio.com/ .
I will write more on the animals, farms, and people who we rely on in the future. The big question right now is what to name our product? This has proven more difficult than naming our daughter. We were favoring “ManSpun Yarn”, but he already exists (http://www.manspun.com/) and is looking pretty awesome, too. Some of the recent deliberations are between “HommeSpun” (Homme means “man” in French) or possibly just plain “Trevor’s yarns”. Let us know if you have any ideas or like one of these ideas!
It is a very hot day today and all the rain that was promised has yet to arrive. Trevor and Aubrey watered the garden anyways, just to be safe.
Angie Gustafson 