Australian superfine wool is highly regarded… mine is not.
The wool produced on my farm is grubby, lanolinny and sometimes-a-bit-poopy and ‘carpet quality’ at best.
Which is probably why it’s sat around in the shed for years – until it accidentally (& wonderfully) became skincare packaging – and my sheep finally paid their own bills.
Sometimes when I cant be bothered with the witchy skincare story, I tell people I’m a ‘grazier’ which is technically correct, because my sheep graze for wool production.
And when I’m swinging my pelvis and trying to look serious, it goes down like a lead ballon when I’m asked about how many head I run.
The answer is 5. Which most other farmy pelvis swingers assume to mean 500 or 5000.
But no… it’s just 5.
My sheep came to me as orphan lambs, in a time when I was capable of accommodating such things as bottle feeding…
Truth be told, I didn’t know they’d grow into such fence wrecking arseholes, or live for 20 + years…But I love them. They’re my friendsheep.
But last year when the drought was biting hard, the relationship was strained.
How Wool Became Skincare Packaging
It was a beautiful, awkward, urgent accident.
Basically – one day I ran out of scrunchy paper packaging so put up a post saying “On a scale of ewwww to unreal how would you feel about your order arriving in not-very-clean sheep’s wool?”
The response was somewhere between warm and tepid.. certainly not red hot.
For every “Sounds great” and “Can’t wait” there were a few Sensible Susans raising concerns about the freeloading poo, seeds & prickles that would come along for the ride.
Completely valid concerns.. but I was already running late so I just bundled them off and factored in some refund requests and one star reviews for the following week.
But while I was waiting for the ‘proper’ packaging to arrive, the messages rolled in.
“I love the wool! I put it outside and have been watching the wrens take it for their nests”
“I’m using it as mulch on my house plant”
“My wife keeps sniffing it.. she says it reminds her of the lambs when we lived on the farm”
So I decided to keep the wool as a permanent thing… Also ring-a-ding-ding, it finally gave me a grown up, tax department approved reason for having my sheep (because now they’re official ‘suppliers’)
