The Silly Sheep Fibre Company

The Silly Sheep fibre company is a small family croft enterprise, on  the West Mainland of Shetland in the village of Walls.

We started producing our own knitting wools while we were living in the Outer Herbrides to give our growing sheep family a purpose.

Our first 6 Scotttish Blackface lambs, all orphans arrived in 2013, by 2017 we also had 9 Hebridean sheep. Having already experimented with the Blackface wool, we decided to have the Hebridean fleeces made in to knitting wool. That lead on to being  given or buying other local fleeces to make up the quantity needed for the mill. Wool is addictive & one batch of yarn lead onto experimenting with natural dyes & with mixing breeds to give different yarns.

We now have 74 sheep, mainly Shetlands and a few Shetland x Hebridean some who moved to Shetland with us nearly 3 yrs ago including a lovely old Scottish Blackface ewe who was one of our original orphan lambs from 2013. We don't add her wool to out knitting fibre as it is now to course but it doesn't go to waste.

For the last 3  years we have used beautiful local Shetland rams who have produced lots of lovely lambs, they will provide us with beautiful fleeces for the next few years. We sadly no longer have our Hebrideans but still have some of their offspring.

We now use our own fleeces and some from other local crofts to have  batches of white & natural coloured knitting yarns produced, also fibres for spinning, weaving and felting.

All of the dyeing is done by us in small batches in our workshop.

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