I’ve been doing research for one of my fiction stories and came across this article in the process. 

https://www.fashionroundtable.co.uk/news/why-skills-are-more-important-than-ever

The author of this article visits a ‘mill’ in Wales. This mill does not grind wheat; it is a place for weaving cloth out of sheep fleece, with all the steps that that implies. The article never really explains why skills are more important than ever but it does address, successfully or not, why maintaining old-fashioned skills is important. The author references a statement from UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) about preserving skills as well as objects.

“As far back as 2003, UNESCO developed a Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage which stated that safeguarding traditional craftsmanship should focus not only on preserving craft objects like the work that museums do, but also in a continuation in developing opportunities for and encouraging thereof artisans to continue with their traditional crafts so that they can transmit this knowledge to others.” (And the grammar there is not mine, this is a copy/paste.)

Included in this Unesco ‘Convention’ were dancing in Indonesia and storytelling in China, as well as weaving in the United Arab Emirates. To me this is not serious. Food, clothing, and shelter are basic needs for any human being. Weaving is a real and important skill that can provide both clothing and shelter. It also needs tools and the knowhow to use them for the best results. Dancing and storytelling, no matter how vital to a happy community, can be passed on without the same investment that something like weaving needs.

“Unless a concerted effort is made, there is a serious danger of skills which have been around for centuries dying out.” 

Note that in this case what is really being talked about is the skill of using the tools in the mill. This is qualitatively different from dancing. Machines must be used and maintained and that becomes progressively more difficult as the complexity of the machines increases. 

For example, if you leave your car in the barn for thirty years you will have to spend more than it was originally worth to get it running again. On the other hand, when it does run, you will probably be able to drive it — unless it is a stick shift and you can’t drive stick. That particular situation arose in a random story I read where a carjacking failed because the would-be carjacker couldn’t drive a four-on-the-floor.  In general though, as a car driver, you are going faster or slower, and turning or going straight.

A mill that produces cloth is actually much more complex, especially depending on how processed the incoming material is. By that I mean, if it is fleece straight from a shearing, or if the fleece is washed or carded, or spun, or plied elsewhere, there is less to do in the mill. In Georgette Heyer’s story, The Unknown Ajax, the hero touches briefly on the idea of woolen mills and taking the fleece from “sheep to shawl”. This was part of the original industrial revolution in the late 1700s, beginning with spinning jennies and steam engines.

I am sympathetic to the idea that knowing how to run an old-fashioned mill is important. In fact I’d love to know myself. In the US if you buy a fleece and want someone else to wash and card it for you, there is a year long wait. The mills that do that for hand spinners are totally swamped. Sometimes when I’m dreaming that I finally got my shepherdess/heroine out of the hayloft and into the arms of the hero, and I imagine doing a sequel, I think she should start a mill. 

But I know something about the economics of the situation that the author of that article, way up top, is skimming over. When I say ‘something’ I mean that I do NOT understand everything at all. Beginning with, I don’t understand how people who have sheep make any money at all. 

Here’s the thing. When you shear some random sheep, and you have to because otherwise they overheat and trip and get more filthy than anyone wants to imagine, that fleece is maybe worth a dollar a pound. Or maybe a dollar a fleece. So you aren’t raising the sheep for that because you are losing money if the sheep eats.  And you had to pay the shearer. 

As a handspinner, I can buy 4 ounces (1/4 pound) of beautiful carded and dyed wool for $20. Or more, but let’s use that as a starting point. That’s $80 a pound. I can buy a carefully trimmed fleece of high quality wool that weighs about 4 pounds for $120. I send it to a mill and ask them only to wash and card it. That costs me about $75 dollars, (trust me on that number) and I don’t get four pounds back because they washed a lot of grease out of it. Maybe a few bits of organic matter like grass and twigs also. So I’ve spent $195 and have three pounds of undyed, beautiful wool that has cost me $65 per pound. Divide by 4 and I’m spending $17 on a skein of wool. A dyer who is buying wool to dye and sell, probably has a bit more leeway than I do, because they will have a bit of scale, but less than you think. In the example, essentially, there’s $15 dollars there for the dyer’s material and labor and profit. 

But the people who sold me the fleece for $120 have maybe 100 sheep. So they make $12,000 if they sell all their fleeces for this average price.  They have to subtract the cost of the feeding the sheep for a year, and taking care of the fleeces so they are worth that much. Usually, that involves keeping the sheep coated which is just exactly what it sounds like. The sheep wear a coat. If you don’t do that your fleece price goes down and processing costs go up. If you own the land, you are still paying taxes. Are you breeding the sheep? More money on food must be spent, that will offset the money you might get by selling the lambs. They aren’t making a lot of money even though I’ve paid a huge sum to have a pile of material that I now have to spin into something usable. Redheart yarn is affordable because it is spun, most likely in China, out of that dollar-a-fleece wool. But, as you can see, you can spend more than you want to imagine on some skein of wool in a yarn store that is locally sourced and spun.

What this really shows is that we don’t begin to comprehend the scale of the industrial revolution. The mill in Wales, using hand labor, cannot compete with a modern industrial mill, if its job is to provide clothing for a large number of people. If I happen to have a hobby I enjoy and if, in pursuit of that hobby I keep buying further and further back in the supply chain, that’s entertainment. It is not serious production of clothing for large numbers of people.