Halifax Spinning Mill

Make sure your volume is turned down low as this is rather a noisy page!
With a few small videos captured when I visited the Halifax Spinning Mill so that I can show you how they produce the lovely yarn from the fleeces shorn from our own sheep for our Moondance Wools yarns.
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As soon as Johnny has finished shearing our sheep their fleeces are carefully picked over to remove any bits of vegetation and debris.

Then we sort them according to their natural colours, pack them in large bags and send them off to the mill.

When they arrive, first job is to get them washed organically and then dried.

Once cleaned, the wool is put through a 'picker' machine to open up the individual staples and fibres, readying for carding. After this process it is blown into the closed storage area by a huge vacuum.

The wool is gradually loaded by hand into the large wool hamper in front of the first set of rollers on the carding machine. Then the machine is switched on and a series of rollers of various sizes, beaters, and conveyor belts propel the wool through the machine. As it travels through the successive carding rollers, it turns the carded wool into an ever smaller diameter of roving as can be seen in the slide show above left.

Finally this is reduced to a simple twist called pencil roving and is ready to move on to the spinning machine.

The first spinning stage winds the yarn to cones of single ply and then to new cones to make the 3-ply which is wound into skeins, these are washed and dried and then sent back to me at Moondance Wools.

Moondance yarns are primarily produced in their beautiful natural shades. However, in order to get a greater range of natural colours and our own unique shades, different shades of wool may be blended at the carding stage to soften or darken the original colour.

Many thanks to Paul and everyone at the Halifax Spinning Mill for spending the time to show us around and allow us to see and film all the different processes for ourselves.

Please take a look at the previous page to see all the Moondance Yarns that are available now.