Creating a new spinning mill from scratch is difficult, expensive and slow. In this series of blog posts, we’re taking you behind the scenes to show you exactly what goes into the journey to spinning our very own yarn in our very own mill. This instalment looks at how in reality, this project has been a quarter of a century in the making.

Part 1: Building a Mill: Why are we doing it?

I’m writing this post sat in the mill running the comb, processing some beautiful Hebridean sliver into combed top, and honestly - as long as I have good ear defenders on - it’s very peaceful. It also feels utterly surreal when I think back to my earliest memories of Garthenor Organic. I don’t really remember the very start - I was only five years old - but throughout my early memories, the family business formed part of it. I’d earn my pocket money by making shade cards, spend the occasional weekend traipsing around the country to a yarn show or farm visit. I learnt inventory control very young, counting yarn that had arrived back from the local mill into one of our log cabins on the farmyard where it was all stored, piled high in a random miscellany of cardboard boxes.

Going right back to the start, I need to quiz Sally (mum), because she started the whole thing. Back in the late 1990s, we as a family were settled into our idyllic spot clung to the side of a hill overlooking the Teifi Valley in West Wales. We had a small flock of sheep on our farm, a mixture of Shetland, Ryeland, Herdwick, Manx Loaghtan and a scattering of other breeds that sort of seemed to appear over the years. Sally particularly chose those breeds for wool and their wide variety of fibre types, from soft and smooth Shetland to rough and rustic Herdwick, they all played their part.

Sally’s always been a hand spinner, so having these breeds fed that craft, with a seemingly unlimited supply of wool from our own flock. But the thing with sheep is, well, they breed. In a few short years the dozen sheep had become twenty, then thirty, then forty as more land was taken on and converted to being organic. Even for the most avid and prolific hand spinner, there’s a limit to what can be used.

A simple solution was virtually on our doorstep though: a mill! Just five miles from the farm, a small woollen mill was housed in an industrial unit. The mill itself had been founded down in South Wales in Merthyr Tydfil, then moved its way forty miles north east. It’s now down in Cornwall as the Natural Fibre Company, a symbol of the journeys and travels that most mills have taken in their history.

Sally and Chris (dad) met with Robert, the mill manager and Myra, the owner, and an initial couple of test batches were planned. Forty kilograms (around 88lb) of greasy wool were loaded into the back of the old Volvo estate and driven down. Almost daily visits of anticipation over the next several weeks saw the fibre through scouring, opening, carding, spinning and plying, before eventually ending up on the ball winder to become our first ever balls of yarn! It was really only at this point that the enormity of thirty kilograms (66lb) dawned. Alleviating the mountain of wool for hand spinning by getting it spun didn’t really do anything except move the mountain. This was far too big to keep in the stash. What to do with it all?

So, back into the trusty Volvo. This time loaded up with three children - we were 9 (Franki), 7 (Leonora) and 5 (me, Jonny), we all headed to the local farmers market in the beautiful seaside town of Aberystwyth. Amongst the rows of market stalls selling jams, honeys, vegetables and sausages, funny grey and brown balls of wool were quite an oddity. But a hit. We managed to sell out that weekend (save for a few precious balls that had been saved for Sally’s personal stash ahead of time!). It had been worth my dad wrangling with some early version of a word processor and a slightly dodgy laser printer to print the labels that told the world what farm the wool was from: Garthenor.

Sally (standing) and her mum, Ann at one of our very first Farmers Markets.

The topic of what to call the new venture was one of slight debate around the kitchen table. The farm name, Garthenor, was in no doubt, and mentioning Pure Wool didn’t take much convincing on any part, but what about Organic? We were (and still are) a proud organic farm, fully registered with the Soil Association, but unlike plenty of other organic goods - mostly food - no actual standards existed for what constituted organic wool. There are so many variations in the way wool can be grown, prepared and spun that with no formal consensus, it felt disingenuous to use the word Organic on our labels.

After much back and forth over many, many supper times, an agreement was reached. We’d use the word Organic, but Sally and Chris would start the campaign to create formal standards right away. You might be starting to get a sense of the theme of what we do here - our aim is always to do things right, and we never do things by halves.

So the campaign for creating organic standards for textiles began in collaboration with the Soil Association (the UK’s largest organic certifying organisation) and the local mill. It was a bit of a mystery where to start - the industry simply wasn’t set up for such standards to be written, and this was before the global push for more sustainable textiles. As a result, none of the chemicals (such as spinning oils and scouring detergents) were even tested for lots of harmful substances, let alone reviewed and improved.

Whilst this campaign was ongoing, there was a burgeoning business to grow, and demand was looking excellent. We introduced hand knitted garments made from our yarn, and had a small but mighty network of knitters making bespoke knitwear to travel off around the world. All too soon, we had somehow outgrown our own flock - by now nearing a hundred sheep - so we set off to find some other like minded farmers to increase our stocks. Liz, a local farmer from whom we’d bought a handful of chickens had a flock of Organic Poll Dorsets, Jane had a flock of Manx Loaghtan and Helen had some Shetlands. This enabled us to grow our batch sizes, whilst also from day one committing to paying a fair price for the wool that goes into our yarn.

Things were looking great! Business growth, lots of demand, a great local mill - what could go wrong? Farmers in the UK might know where this is heading, because 2001 was a tumultuous year for British agriculture, to say the least.