It All Began...

     With a desire to be warm and to not have an empty nest.  As I graduated from high school, my mom began to preemptively plan her next career.  With two younger siblings, she still had 8 years before her "full-time mom" gig would become part-time, but she figured if she didn't start now, she wouldn't have something to distract her from that inevitable empty nest. 

     So she started to build Starcroft.  A long-time seamstress, quilter, lover of color and texture, as well as a new-found knitter & hand-spinner, she thought about what she would love to spend every hour of the day doing.  The answer?  Playing with fiber.

     In order to have as much fiber as possible to play with, she decided she would process wool for other spinners and sheep farmers - making custom yarns, rovings and batts.  The second floor of my parent's farmhouse barn was converted into a spinning mill, with a set of Belfast Mini Mills machines, a dye kitchen, workroom, and cedar wool-storage closet in early 2001.  

     Soon after my parents met the Wakemans, and my mom's desire to create her own line of yarn happily melded with the Wakeman's desire to keep Jenny's Nash Island shepherding traditions alive.  Nash Island Wool found a local buyer and Starcroft Fiber Mill found a unique source of local fiber. 

     All the work done at Starcroft is done by hand by our family, and we take a lot of pride in making a local product.  We love working with the Wakemans and visiting the Nash Island flock on their beautiful island.  We hope that you enjoy our products and thank you for supporting two small family businesses.

                                                                    - Leah Estell 

The Mill Process

     Fleeces are first given a gentle wash with a bit of soap to remove grease, dirt, and extraneous bits of seaweed.  The cleaned fibers are then spun out and dried on racks.  Once dry, they are fed though the Opener, which has big teeth to fluff the locks apart, turning the fleeces into a big woolly cloud.  After the fleeces are opened, they can be dyed to make felting fiber.   

     After opening, the wool is weighed into batches to ensure even spinning and fed through the Carder.  The weight of the batches is determined by the type of yarn being made, (it's roughly about two handfulls) and is weighed on an ounce scale.  The Carder has a series of drums covered with combs, which line the fibers of wool up in the same direction.  The wool comes off the Carder as either a tube (called roving) or a sheet (called a batt).  Batts can then be made into felt (which we use to make rugs, blankets and placemats).  Some of the roving we dye up for hand-spinning and felting.

     If we're making yarn, the roving (un-dyed) continues to the Drafter, where it is rolled between rollers to pull the fibers further apart, creating a thinner roving.  Roving may be drafted several times to create a very thin laceweight yarn, or just run through once or twice to create a worsted weight yarn. 

     After drafting, the roving is run through the Spinner, once to create a ply of yarn, then again doubled up to create a two-ply yarn.  Each year the spinning machine's tension is tweaked to created the same size yarn - getting 175 yds to weigh 100 g each time is no easy feat.  Since each ply of the yarn is twisted, and spinning the two plys together twists them back upon each other, the finished yarn is strong and produces less piling. 

     The yarn is then wound on the Skein Winder from the Spinner's bobbins into 175 yard hanks.  The hanks are hung on bamboo poles along the ceiling so that the yarn can settle into it's new twisted state.  After resting, the yarn is dyed in small kettle-batches (we use lobster pots on a stove) using our special family recipe, to create our beautiful variegated colors.   

The Family Business

Jani 

CEO & Director of Operations, Master Spinner & Dyer, Collector of Lichen Photos.

Grant

Wool Washer, Chief of Engineering & Repairs.

Leah

VP of Marketing, Web Curator, Assistant Art Director & Happy Hour Coordinator.  

Security provided by Otto.

 Mill Processing Services

We are currently booked with mill orders through 2010. 

Feel free to check back in Spring 2011 to see if we're all caught up and accepting new orders.