registered Montadale and Montadale crossed sheep and fleeces

We offer both raw fleeces and wool products from the flock, as well as club lambs for showing and freezer lambs. We have yarns that have been spun from hand washed fleeces and yarns spun from professionally processed fleeces. There are hand dyed rovings available as well as rovings that have been hand blended with other breeds and types of fleeces, such as Corridale, Romney, Mohair, Alpaca and some Angora. We offer the opportunity to purchase raw fleeces from some of our friends as well, who raise Cotswolds and Romneys. Some of them have rovings available as well as the raw fleeces.

The club lambs and freezer lambs are available after they reach 2 months of age. The Montadales are a dual purpose sheep so they have a high rate of gain for the show ring and are large enough to provide a sizeable carcass without being too much for the smaller freezers today.

Raw Fleeces
Raw fleeces are available from both the Montadales as well as from neighboring Romney and Cotswold flocks. The fleeces from Windy Wool Windings are all covered all year and are heavily skirted for hand spinning. The Montadale fleece does not have a lot of lanolin content so it does not take as much washing to prepare it for spinning. The Montadale and Montadale cross fleeces have a staple lenght of 3 to 4 inches and have a very tight crimp. When washed, the Montadale fleeces tend to "poof" and expand so that they look like a table full of cloud!! The Romney and Cotswold fleeces have some that were covered and some that were not but all the fleeces have been heavily skirted for hand spinning. The Romney and Cotswold fleeces have an average of staple length of 4 to 6 inches.

Rovings and Yarns
We have both rovings and yarns available. Most of the rovings currently available are produced by sending the fleeces to a commercial processor simply because I don't have the capability to process all of the fleeces. I do hand dye and hand blend the roving once it returns to home. Some of the Romney roving was created especially for making the Shepard Rugs that are so popular right now. The spinning batts are created on my drum carder here in the studio.

The yarns made from our fleeces are hand spun. I use both an Ashford and a Country Craftsman spinning wheel to create the yarns. It is difficult to describe the various yarns so I have pictures of some of the yarn options currently available. We have several different blends available.

Weavings
I use a Louet 4 shaft loom for most of my weavings. I enjoy using the handspun yarns as weft for my projects, which usually consist of either throws, blankets or shawls. A lot of my yarns I have flashing or mylar spun into so the result is a nice sparkly that catches the light. I also have weavings using just the natural colors from the sheep that gives a warm, cozy feeling just looking at them.