The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Livestock => Sheep => Topic started by: Hillview Farm on March 28, 2014, 03:11:09 pm
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I have a mixed bag of sheep, a few shetlands, llyens, Suffolk mules, charollais and southdowns oh and a few llama fleeces.
What sort of price do you think I should charge? I know sine won't be worth spinning but I have some nice fleeces and some shearlings in the pipe line. How much does a fleece weigh?
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For my shetland and shetland cross fleeces I charge between £2-5 per kilo direct to a spinner who is based in stroud.
So if you were to market your shetland fleeces to a handspinner I think you could sell them for around what I do, however I dont know about the other fleeces you have, I didnt think suffolk and some down breeds wool go for an awful lot but it depends on what people are looking for :)
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How much roughly does a Shetland fleece weigh?
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1-2kgs I think...
You get a few different kinds of shetland fleeces though
Some of my shetlands have heavy thick fleeces
and some have really finely crimped fleeces
last year moorit fleeces and katmoget fleeces got a higher price then the white fleeces, but this year I have 5 new shetlands that have fantastic fleeces in white which may out price my moorits... time will tell :)
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Don't underprice your product, but only offer for sale the best fleece. Offering bad and dirty fleece will lose you custom and give you a bad reputation.
Most of your breeds are not typical craft work fleece producers, so don't expect many of those to sell. Some will sell to someone with a specific project in mind, so do put them out there. For the Shetlands the opposite is true - they are very popular but also the market could well be flooded as they are a popular breed and most breeders will be trying to sell to spinners, felters and so on, so yours need to be special.
Before you think of offering fleece for sale, have a good look at each one, unrolled. I have written somewhere in TAS a blow by blow method for assessing a fleece for selling to crafters. Sorry but I don't know how to find that, although I think Sally stashed it somewhere so folk could find it again.
It's well worth taking the trouble to check over your fleece so you can present it well.
I know nothing about llama fibre, but it could be hairy - not beloved by spinners, as the hair has to be removed. So selling those will depend totally on the quality. Plenty of people offer alpaca fibre for sale, but I don't think llama fibre is so available so might be something spinners would try on the offchance if it wasn't too expensive.
Pricewise for sheep fleece, start low at the prices Ladygrey suggests, then if you sell successfully the first year, up your price next clip.
I wouldn't offer for sale a fleece which I thought was worth less than £5, but £5 is what fleece was selling for back in the 1970s. It's a fact that spinners and craft workers are not prepared to spend much on their raw material, in spite of the fact that it is something they will be working on for weeks if not months. I don't really get this, but there you go.
My run of the mill fleeces from Hebrideans and Shetlands I would sell for about £8-10, and good ones for £10-15. I used to breed specialist fleece sheep until about 8 years ago and would get up to £20 per fleece for those. I know of a top fleece producer who asks, and gets, £40 for top fleeces (that was several years ago so may have gone up since then)
I don't sell my fleece by the pound or kilo, as my primitive fleeces are fairly small, and vary in quality over the fleece, so if you were to take a kilo from one part it would be of a very different quality to other bits. My fleece specials were much more consistent and also huge, so I offered those in halves (split along the backbone) for £10 per half.
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I sort really carefully through my fleeces removing all debris, very short/double cut bits that aren't alot of use to anyone (though the slightly longer double cuts can be used in spinning for added texture). The fleece is also skirted so nothing but useful fleece remains. This makes a real difference to the prices I can charge which are different from lamb through gimmer and wether to ewe/ram (look on my site for pricing differences). People appreciate the lack of faffing about they personally have to do and are happy to pay a better price to me. You could go one step further and sell premium locks in 100gramme baggies raw or washed as you choose (look on ebay for some price guidance). If your sheep are renowned for their wool as 'spinners' quality there's a good market out there. Start with your local Guild of Spinners, Weavers and Dyers for customers. Word of mouth gets around pretty quickly from there. Basically the more processing you do the better price you can get. My customers like to wash their own fleece and be involved in the whole process. Removing bits of poo and straw/hay etc is one stage they don't mind missing out on ;D
Fleecwife's advice is darned good.
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Before you think of offering fleece for sale, have a good look at each one, unrolled. I have written somewhere in TAS a blow by blow method for assessing a fleece for selling to crafters. Sorry but I don't know how to find that, although I think Sally stashed it somewhere so folk could find it again.
Yes, I collated a few good links in the Spinning Resources thread here (http://www.accidentalsmallholder.net/forum/index.php?topic=26349.msg258282#msg258282).
I wonder whether we could or should get that thread stickied?