It's busy bustling around here, both with my fingers on the keyboard, with more ETF website work (almost done far enough to launch, though!) and other kinds of bustling. Kinds that have resulted in something like a wool explosion in the wintergarden... all due to new things planned for the shop.
I've been offering both washed, uncombed wool and carded/combed for a good while now, and there's a very, very obvious preference in regards to what gets bought more. Guess what? Of course - the ready-to-spin, prepared fibre. And I totally get this - while combing wool is a fascinating process and allows for extremely fine control of what goes in and what does not, it is a good chunk of work that requires both time and appropriate tools. So in most cases, I would also prefer to take readily prepped fibres and sit down and spin, skipping the prep step.
I have now found a small fibre mill that is willing to process a chunk of fibres I send them, so I'm planning on having Valais Blacknose wool combed up into a band, good for spinning without having to work on it first. That's exciting, and that also means I have to sort and pack the wool to send it to the mill. Hence: Wool Explosion as I sort my way through the fleeces I have here from the last shearings.
It's all very exciting - partly because it is very hard to estimate how much of a price I will have to ask for that wool in the end; that depends on how much of a weight loss there is through combing, and that is hard to impossible to guess. So I'm hoping I will end up with a sensible number to put onto that price tag - and that it will all turn out nicely!