Many of the warmest hats, sweaters, and base layers we reach for this winter will be made at least in part from wool. The smell of wet wool drying on radiators and floor vents is as familiar as woodsmoke to many of us. You may even be a fiber crafter and have a new hat on your crochet hook or knitting needles right this minute. But how often do you stop to think about how that wool became yarn, or how long it took for that wool to get from an animal’s body to your hands?
I have been working in the fiber arts industry for nearly 15 years and have owned a local independent yarn shop in a rural area north of Seattle, Washington, for eight years. Just after things started to open up after COVID-19 lockdowns, a couple of local friends opened a wool processing mill. I quickly learned about the variety of products beyond yarn and hand-spinning wool that could be produced for general use in various industries: insulation, pellets for garden use, and sheets of felt, to name a few.
At roughly the same time, I started receiving a few calls each month from people inquiring about finding shearers for their sheep. It seemed like these calls were related to people moving to our relatively rural area and buying property during lockdowns, then purchasing a few sheep as both pets and a solution for vegetation management; most of the time, these were people new to livestock ownership. However, sheep are a well-established part of many farms and homesteads in our area, so I wondered why they couldn’t find someone to help them. A conversation with my mill-owning friends provided a simple answer: there aren’t enough shearers. And there certainly aren’t enough shearers who will work with the “microflocks” (flocks of fewer than 10 sheep) that are common in our area of the country—it’s just not cost-effective for most professionals to set up for such small groups of animals.
After doing some research, I decided to apply to the Washington State Shearing School. It is one of the only shearing schools in the United States that run for longer than two or three days and one of the only shearing schools that take anyone— not just sheep owners—as students. I neither own sheep nor have really worked with livestock seriously at any point in my life, so this seemed like a sign. I like sheep. I like wool, I reasoned. It’s hard work, but wouldn’t it be amazing to be able to help make shearing more accessible—and help spread the word about the possibilities of wool as a renewable resource? Besides, full immersion in the animal-focused side of the industry would give me unique insight into the factors that impact those of us who normally work with more refined products in the fiber arts supply chain; drought, animal health, and nutrition all play roles in the price and quality of wool, which eventually impacts the end-customer price of yarn.
In late December 2023, I was notified that I had been accepted for the 2024 session in Moses Lake, Washington. I started strength training in earnest and studying shearing position diagrams to get familiar with the work ahead. My shop community helped cover the costs; registration fees, gas, a hotel room, and food for a week added up to nearly $1,500, not to mention the financial impact of closing down my business for a week. In return for that material support, I decided to post a live video each night on the shop’s Instagram account so the public could follow along. I figured it would be a unique way to share my journey, and maybe a few people would gain a greater appreciation for what it takes to bring wool-based yarn to our shelves.
Nothing could have prepared me for what came next. You can watch videos and talk to people about it, but nothing compares to actually being on a shearing floor with live animals. Online interest in the process far exceeded the few people I expected, and it spread wider than I would have thought possible . . . including to the offices of Midd Magazine. This is not how I planned to ever write for the alumni magazine, as it is about as far as you can get from an MA in French; however, as the Language PledgeÒ shows us, we can do hard things and benefit from full immersion in knowledge, interactions, and processes. Here, then, is a brief summary of my shearing school experience, taken from my live videos.
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Day 1: I figured out my philosophy for the week: “I didn’t die. I didn’t kill any sheep. I didn’t hurt my sheep beyond repair. Therefore, today was a success.” I sheared one sheep. My lack of livestock experience put me behind everyone else in the class, and I gave great thought to walking away at lunchtime and not coming back. However, as one of our instructors said, every single shearer ever has been through this process. We’re not the first people to do this work, and we won’t be the last. One of our shop mottos is to be brave enough to be bad at something, and I decided that I might as well own it.
Day 2: Two and a half sheep shorn. A better day, despite one sheep emptying its bladder on me and another one kicking a hole in my brand-new pair of work pants. At this point, I started to realize how physically unprepared I was for shearing school, how being short presents serious challenges to the ability to run through the shearing positions, and how much harder it is to learn to shear when you are also learning how to handle livestock for the first time.
Day 3: Four sheep shorn. I learned that bodychecking sheep to keep them from running away is one of my strengths. I also got some valuable lessons in sheep anatomy, including a run-in with shearing a long-tailed sheep and shearing around pizzles. This is also the day where I started learning which liniments and ointments work best for different aches, pains, and bruises.
Day 4: This was the day where my body said enough was enough. Eight months later, I’m still not sure if I sheared 1.5 sheep or 2.5 sheep, but it was the day where I got brave enough to walk away rather than pushing beyond my comfort level or capacity with a brand-new skill. After lunch on Day 4, the sheep that came in were eye level with my shoulder (just about four feet off the ground) and easily over 200 pounds per animal. As I later told friends, “Those aren’t sheep at that point. Those are ponies.” I knew that it would be a struggle to physically manage them, that I would likely injure myself just getting them out of the pre-shearing containment area, and that I was not comfortable attempting the shearing positions with animals that big. I walked away and decided to watch a stand shearing demonstration with competition-grade show sheep instead. It is hard to take that lump, but if your goal is not to die, not to kill sheep, and to keep all the people and animals safe from harm as much as possible, it is the necessary lump to take.
Day 5: The last day of shearing school was, oddly, the one where I sheared the fewest sheep. As I pulled the first one out of the containment area, she kicked and knocked me flat on the ground while I continued to hold her; this sandwiched me between her and the floor. After getting in position and starting the first shearing position, I realized I had popped something in my back and was going to end up seriously injuring myself if I didn’t stop immediately. It felt like failure to walk away from the work so quickly, but it also felt like not walking away would result in violating the “no dying, no serious injury” rule. This is also the day where I learned that you can, in fact, sweat a prescription-strength lidocaine patch off your back. (Physically recovering from shearing school took the better part of six weeks.)
Since finishing shearing school in April 2024, I have shorn two sheep solo, assisted with two more, and worked on adjacent animal care tasks that we did not get to practice in shearing school. I am incredibly lucky to have a local shearing mentor who can accompany me to job sites and help me learn adaptive shearing techniques that were not a part of the shearing school program. I am still very slow—my best time currently is 25 minutes for one sheep, far from the two or three minutes per animal you see on TikTok—but I am still dedicated to finding my spot in the shearing ecosystem and helping shepherds take the best possible care of their animals, even in the smallest flocks.
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