If you are the owner of a small flock of sheep, what are you doing with your fleeces? 
Rosemary Champion, a well-known smallholder from Carnoustie, in Angus, has a flock of coloured Ryeland sheep and, up to this point, she has been lining her hanging baskets with her fleeces, which makes for a lovely flower display, but gives her no return whatsoever.
This year, after prompting from her friend, Sue Blacker, of the Natural Fibre Company, in Cornwall, Rosemary decided to take the pain of paying for her coloured Ryeland fleeces to be processed and returned to her as yarn. 
She now hopes to get in touch with other small flock owners in the hope of pulling together some sort of co-operative so that they can work together to have fleeces processed and then sell the yarn.
“The thought of paying for the fleeces to be spun into yarn and then having to find a market to sell them has put us off doing it for years. But, this year we sent away 13 fleeces which cost about £700 to process and in return we got 288 balls of yarn back. 
"We have worked out that if we sell all our wool, then we will have doubled our money,” says Rosemary. "That’s a lot more exciting than leaving the fleece lying in a wool bag for a couple of years!
“It was easy. The woolbags were sent to us, we filled them, the Natural Fibre Company arranged a courier to pick them up, and the yarn was delivered back to us in boxes.”
Rosemary already had a website for her coloured Ryelands and now they have added an on-line shop to sell the yarn from www.rosedeanryelands.co.uk. So far, she is delighted to report sales from Alaska, Australia and the USA, as well as local sales. 
The coloured wool that her sheep produce is popular with knitters who are interested in the provenance of the wool they use. They invest in the back story.
Rosemary continues: “I popped along to the Edinburgh Yarn Festival and was surprised at how popular knitting is. It’s huge now. 
"There were 1800 people arriving each day, and it was ladies in their 30s and 40s that made up the majority. I don’t knit, so it has been a surprise to me that there is this huge market out there.
“It’s not like when I was a child when people knitted because they couldn’t afford to buy clothes. 
“Nowadays, it is a designer-led business. If you are going to invest in buying a pattern and then spend many, many, hours creating a garment, then people want quality wool, they want to know where their wool is coming from.
"They want the story, the information on the breed, where it comes from, who is involved and we have all that at our fingertips.”
She decided to look into how much it costs to take a table at events where they could sell the wool, and first off she picked Woolfest, which is a festival held in Cockermouth. 
Rosemary had the idea that if she could get more small-scale wool producers together, they could split costs which enables them to have a presence at these type of shows and markets.
Rosemary admits that she doesn’t have all the answers at the moment. She is in the early stages of having an idea of how people in the same position as her could be making money from their fleeces. 
Will they create a co-operative and send their wool off together under the same name? Maybe. Will they keep their own brand names and sell together? Possibly.
“I don’t know the details,” says Rosemary, “but I am happy to discuss it with anyone who is interested, as I know there is a market out there for our fleeces. I’m happy to get together with other sheep owners who want to discuss it and see where it takes us.
“We have just sent off another two lots of fleeces for processing. This time a light coloured batch and another batch of dark fleeces. In total, we sent 19 and we can’t wait to see how the yarn looks when it comes back.”