The wonder of wool A knitter's guide to pure breed sheep

For 30 years I have worked in the fashion industry, designing knitwear for some of Britain's best-known brands. It's a career that's brought me enormous pleasure: encapsulating changing trends; travelling the world to source new yarns; seeing a fashion company's rapid expansion, based on the success of designs we released with ever-increasing speed. Then, in 2019, I picked up a book: Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion by Dana Thomas. And suddenly, for me, everything changed. I learned that 20 per cent of the 100 billion items of clothing produced each year go unsold; usually shredded, buried or incinerated. How around 9,500 garments are dumped into British landfill every five minutes, making textiles the country's fastest-growing waste stream. I did more research, discovering that fashion is one of the world's top 10 most-polluting industries. Shoppers now buy five times more clothing than in 1980 and Britons buy more clothes than any other European country. I read how the explosion in cheap cashmere risks creating famine in Mongolia, where fertile land once used for human food is now pasture for goats. I wondered how I could have known so little about fashion's environmental impact, and decided to do something to redress this. So, 30 years after my first degree, I embarked on a Master's in Textile Design, focusing on creating a model for sustainable knitwear. A journey that would take me to every part of the British Isles. When I worked as a knitwear designer, a key part of my job involved meeting agents. On a weekly basis I'd be shown ranges of new fibres and yarns - mostly sourced from Italy, Australia, or China. Occasionally someone would show me a British sample - just one weight of a dull cream wool that wasn't particularly soft yet had a price tag twice that of merino. Unsurprisingly I never once considered buying it. However, when I started looking into sustainable knitwear, local wool was the obvious place to begin. My first stop was British Wool: the organisation that represents British wool farmers. Anyone with four or more adult sheep is required to register and sell their fleeces through it, the only exception being Shetland producers. Touring their wool grading and auction facilities, I discovered that Britain has 62 pure (or ancient) breeds of sheep, spanning a beautiful range of natural colours. Feeling the fleeces, I encountered incredible variety; some with much finer fibres than others. Yet at the time they were separated into just three grades: fine for apparel, medium for carpets, and coarse for insulation. These days, with buyers showing an increased interest in British wool, these grades have expanded. But still, if you want the softest wool, you have to be picky. I knew this from four happy years spent at Ballantyne Cashmere. The fibre itself isn't damaging to the environment, particularly if produced in the way it was when Ballantyne still existed. Back then, limited numbers of goats were grazed only in the mountains of Mongolia where, because of the exceptionally cold nights, they grow a topcoat along with a particularly fine undercoat. When they moult in the spring, just one part of this (the underbelly) is combed out to source the softest hairs. Running my fingers through the British fleeces got me thinking. What if there was a cashmere-equivalent sheep hiding here? Particularly if I separated out the best bits. I decided to knit a sample from all 62 breeds, experimenting with how well they knitted up. It took me a year to track down the wool or fleece for every sheep; grateful that each has its own breed society through which I could contact the relevant farmers. They all take huge pride in their flocks, yet few had ever been asked for a wool sample, especially for the purposes of knitting. As the fleeces began to arrive, just as I had suspected, I found that some of the older native breeds - like the Soay and the Wiltshire - do have a soft, self-moulting undercoat. One dissertation and two years later I had completed my MA and reduced the 62 breeds to 12 I was confident could produce a yarn that was soft enough to knit and be a pleasure to wear. I'd also become self-employed, setting up a sustainable knitwear company called Ossian. Britain has more breeds of sheep than any other country, with extraordinary lineages stretching back centuries. Yet our sheep farmers are in perpetual crisis. Business is jeopardized by cheap lamb imports, and wool is now so undervalued that shearing a sheep costs more than the price of its fleece. And yet the yarns produced from rare breed sheep are unmatched in terms of beauty, density, durability, and their range of natural colours. I am convinced that there is a sustainable knitwear industry to be fashioned out of heritage British wool. I am equally convinced that the fashion industry needs to find different ways of doing things. Urgently. This book is part of my mission to help find answers. "Too many clothes kill clothes", Jean Paul Gaultier once said. So we all need to buy less, but buy better. And yes, a hand-knitted 100 per cent British rare breed jumper won't be cheap. But nor should it be. It is, after all, a thing of pure beauty. Excerpted from The Wonder of Wool: A Knitter's Guide to Pure Breed Sheep by Justine Lee, Jess Morency All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.