Wicklow Wool Blanket

A deep dive into farm to fabric creating beautiful Irish wool textiles and blankets from Wicklow to Donegal and back to Dublin. This is a long and slow endeavour as we learn as we go to harvest the exceptionally beautiful local fleece, scour, wash and spin into yarn, weave into cloth, finish and cut and sew. 

The team;
Catherine Crowe, Farmer and Romney sheep breeder
Chris from Donegal Yarns, Scouring, washing, carding and spinning the wool
Tristan from Studio Donegal, Handweaving and finishing the fabric
Vivi from Stable, cutting and sewing

With Catherine’s clip from 2024 and 2025 we are making a magnificent heavy duty handwoven tweed cloth which we have turned into a luxurious heavy weight blanket. We only have a small number of them as this is an early run. But we intend to create other fabrics and blankets as we explore further.

Background;
Irish fleece has no value to farmers as it is deemed a waste product of the industry, due to the fact that sheep are reared for meat. So the clips and the skins are either mostly disregarded and a small amount collected and exported. 
This is a terrible thing as our native wool is excellent and has so much to offer us here in ireland. 

With a very low percentage of our native wool being actually used we wanted to work together to see how we can address this in some way and to show what we are missing. The reality is we don’t have a large industrial capacity scouring plant in Ireland, so any large scale national processing of our native fleece is not possible at this time. 

We are happy to see that the interest is there from customers and the Irish public for access to our own native wool products. Donegal yarns and Studio Donegal have input incredible energy and effort to make it happen.