Ha, Anke describes the situation exactly!
SallyintNorth recently ran a 'sheep to shawl' event - the fleece was washed beforehand, I wonder if she could work out how many of us, and therefore how many 'people hours' there were involved in the carding, spinning and knitting - it was a lot!
And as Balloch says, you can get a mill do it all, and give you knitting yarn, but it costs. The 'Halifax' mill, which is near Selby(!) is certainly behind and taking months to get anything done, I don't know if others are be bad?