Shearing School Support

One unexpected trip to Ohio and one spring break later, I'm hopeful that we have finally arrived at the point where - following this next absence - I will not be away from the shop every third week for the rest of the year. I'm anxious to get back into my normal routine and not worrying about whether or not I remembered to change the answering machine, stop shipments, and the fifty other tiny tasks that have to happen when I'm away from the shop for an extended period of time.

But I do have one more week-long absence planned from April 22 - 27 so that I can attend the Washington State Wool Producers' Shearing School in Moses Lake, WA. "Shearing?" you might be saying. "But... you're a YARN shop, not a farm - you've said you don't even have sheep! Why would you do this?"

Excellent question!

Over the last couple of years, I've fielded a ton of questions from a variety of community members about where they can find shearers - during the lockdown phase of the pandemic, it seems that quite a few folks decided to add sheep to their properties. However, if you're not dialed in to the local 4H or FFA chapters - or if you're not involved in a homesteading or small farming group - you may not know how to go about getting connected with a shearer. And there aren't a ton of shearers available, either. The folks who are available to hire for shearing are usually booked up in advance of the lambing season, and they usually won't travel to individual farms or homes for small-scale shearing - you bring the animals to a central location and have them shorn there for efficiency's sake, then take them home. So you make do with whoever happens to have the equipment  - whether or not they have training - and you get the wool hacked off your poor animal, and it sits in a bag because you feel like it's too good to waste... but you have no idea what to do next. So you call the yarn shop.

If you ask a certain yarn shop owner about shearing enough, she's going to look into what it requires... and eventually she'll apply, because conversations like the ones outlined above are happening more and more often. AND she's talked with milling colleagues from various cottage mills in the area to see what their take is, and she discovers that THEY are also having these conversations but maybe don't know how to get word out to farmers and shepherds about their processing services. Said yarn shop owner realizes she's in a unique position to bridge that gap, applies for shearing school, and gets into the 2024 class.

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ACTUAL illustration from shearing school materials. This leads me to believe that I may have to anticipate a sheep using me much like Luke uses a tauntaun as a sleeping bag in _The Empire Strikes Back_...?

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So. All that to say that I'm going to shearing school in a week, and it's expensive. How's that, you might ask?

• Shearing school registration: $400
• Motel for the week because my back can't handle car camping right now: $600
• Gas to get to Moses Lake / back: $75
• Food: $20 if I can take frozen blocks of soup and store them in the motel's communal kitchen, $50-75 if not.
• Ibuprofen, heating pad, back/wrist braces, IcyHot: $50-75

Add to that the fact that the shop will be closed for another full week - and that there's no way I can recoup my investment in a single year just by picking up shearing jobs - and it becomes clear that I'm going to need to ask for help in a few different ways. How can you get involved  with this effort?

1. Purchase a shearing school fundraiser item! As seen above, we have a couple of different options from Skagit Woolen Works, who worked with us to develop these ideas. Anna and Jess are generously giving us 50% of the purchase price of each of these items to help underwrite the costs associated with travel and the lost revenue from the shop for a week.
   
2. Make a purchase from the online shop while the shop is closed, or come and see us April 16 - 20 and make some purchases in person!
3. Don't need stuff? You can donate directly through Ko-Fi. Money we take in through Ko-Fi can go directly to the costs ennumerated above, plus the loss of revenue while the shop is closed during shearing school week.

We take this ask VERY seriously. We've always been a full-service yarn shop, but being able to get out in the community to provide responsible, informed shearing services to our local fibershed takes it to a different level. Many of you reading this have shared how important the shop is to you and how important it is to you to support local agriculture and local businesses. Making a purchase or donation, sharing this post or our related social media posts, or even just sharing by word of mouth that there will soon be someone available to help with small-scale shearing are all ways that you can help the shop keep going and help us support colleagues working in various aspects of the local fiber industry.