A stack of folded woollen blankets with knotted fringes.

The Undyed Line

A checked woollen blanket in low side light. Shop blankets
Folded blankets in ochre and cream, stacked on a dark surface.

Ochre throw, 130 × 180

€ 195

A striped cream blanket with a woven label at one corner.

Two-stripe blanket, 150 × 210

€ 240

Balls of wool in olive and cream lying together on wood.

Aran-weight yarn, 100 g

€ 11,50

Skeins of wool in browns and pinks stacked on a shop shelf.

Dye-lot ends, 100 g

€ 7,50 € 11,50

A wooden floor loom with cloth on the beam in a workshop. Shop the loom room
A close-packed flock of sheep seen from above. Meet the flock
Hundreds of warp threads running through the heddles of a loom.

This month’s batch

Soft unspun wool in a pale natural colour.

Roving, undyed, 200 g

€ 14

Cones of spun yarn in browns and red standing in rows.

Cone yarn for weavers, 500 g

€ 38

A single grey ball of wool with a loose end, on a white surface.

Sock weight, grey, 100 g

€ 12,50

What is in a batch
A hand resting on a pile of raw sheep’s wool.

One flock, one shed

Four hundred and twenty ewes on the clay behind the dyke, shorn once a year in the last week of May. The fleece goes forty kilometres to be scoured and spun, and comes back to the shed it left. We weave from March to October and stop when the yarn runs out, which is why the shop is half empty in February.

What the wool is

Not soft, exactly

This is a hardy lowland fleece. It is warm, it wears for thirty years and it is not merino: next to bare skin most people find it scratchy, and a blanket is the right object for it. We say so here rather than after you have opened the parcel. The two dyed lines use madder and weld, both of which move a little in the first wash.

Before you order
Deep crimped fleece still on the sheep, seen close up.

Before you order

Shrinkage
Every blanket is washed and dried once before it is measured, so the size on the label is the size you get. Wash it warm anyway and it will shrink about four per cent and there is nothing to be done about that.
Colour
Madder and weld are plant dyes and each batch differs. The photographs are of the batch in the shed now. If you are matching something you already own, ask for a clipping first — they are free and go out with the ordinary post.
Delivery
Two to four working days in the Netherlands and Belgium, a week further out. Nothing is sent between 20 December and 2 January because the shed is shut.
Returns
Fourteen days, unwashed, in the paper it came in. You pay the return postage unless we got the order wrong. Yarn that has been wound cannot come back.
Seconds
About one blanket in nine has a fault we can see — a slub, a dropped pick, a short fringe. Those go on the seconds table at the mill door on the first Saturday of the month and are never sold as firsts.
What we keep
Your name, address and what you ordered, for seven years, because the tax office says so. No account is made, nothing is shared, and there is no tracking on this page.
An old wooden loom with a shuttle lying across the warp.

Four letters a year.

When the fleece comes back from the spinner, when the dye pots go on, when the seconds table is out, and when we stop for the winter. Nothing else.

Kaarde

Blankets and yarn from the fleece of one flock, woven in the shed where it was shorn. Mill door open on the first Saturday of the month, 10:00 to 15:00.

The mill

Ordering

Kaarde is a fictional example. The flock, the prices and the opening times do not exist. Photographs are stock images and do not show this mill.