In the Navajo Nation, the grass is still green in late May. It snows, dusting the red earth for the last time of this season. It doesn’t last long, and neither will the green grass. Summer is nearly here. 

Our wool buy trip, the earliest of the shearing season, brought us back to the Diné College the week before Memorial Day, where Peace Fleece will buy the bulk of our fine wool needed for our next spin.

Wool arrives at the school in pickup trucks and livestock trailers. On the first day, we buy less than 100 lbs. of fine wool from people who live less than 30 miles from the college. This is the kind of place where you can say “over by the green rocks” and most people know where you mean.  

Beautiful fleeces tumble out of burlap sacks onto our wool grader Stanley’s skirting table. With a touch quickened by 25 years of experience, he deftly identifies that this lot of wool is what we want for Peace Fleece. “See how the dirt line only goes into the tips?” He plucks a bright white bunch from the center of the fleece back on a skirting table. It glitters in the light most of the way through, save about a quarter inch of debris at the tips. “This might be the cleanest fleece we’ve seen all day,” Stanley remarks before moving it to the scale holding the rest of this family’s fine wool.  

"Dense fleeces are usually fine fleeces," Stanley explains as he examines the rest of the belly and leg portions. When Stanley says fine, he colloquially means soft—the softest wool grade available here. This one is no exception. When a fleece grows compact from the sheep’s back, dirt and VM (short for vegetable matter: bits of hay, twigs and other plant particles from the field that catch in the wool) can’t get through, down to the lower parts of the staple. 

Stanley has all kinds of tricks for finding what we need. Staple pinched between fingers can illuminate the difference between finer and coarser wools. A particularly snappy twist-and-flick motion checks for any weak spots in the staple. It's testimony to the good life these sheep experienced to make a fleece like this, as Stanley can’t find any tender parts. The ewe who grew this wool fed and drank well, which is a tough thing to do in a place where water and grass are at a premium.  

Once Stanley confirms the whole lot looks just as good as the first fleece, a small crew of students from the Diné college set the poundage aside to be baled with the rest of the fiber that we buy this year.  

This producer’s flock has about 16 ewes, down from their parent generation’s count of 80 or so. Reasons for the smaller numbers are mostly the same as others who choose to do the same: water. It takes a lot of it to maintain a big flock. Not just for the drinking, but for the alfalfa hay needed to supplement nutrition of the dry scrub land in the winter. Our lead coordinator at the college, Benita, tells us that last year’s alfalfa cut was around $18 per bale. This year, bales are $25 per, and climbing. All that would be survivable, Benita says, if the wool prices kept up with the pace of hay. Many producers in this area are choosing to only keep enough ewes for their personal use, and have forgone sheep as a way to make money, or even come out breaking even. 

The American Sheep Industry (ASI) estimates that wool prices dropped by nearly 30% between 2019 and 2020. Without getting too in the weeds over commodity pricing and how it works, the average price per pound is generally dictated by something that might feel more like the stock market than a negotiation between the producer and wool buyer. Various wide-ranging factors, such as waning popularity in wool suits and their dwindling manufacture, droughts in the West, and appetite for synthetic fibers over natural, have landed the wool market in a tough place. In years past, selling a year’s clip could mean paying for the cost of shearing. Right now, with a rate of pennies per pound for greasy fine wool in this area, most people are losing money by selling their clip. This is the current reality of wool.  

It is why we are grateful for the relationships we’ve made through the Diné College and our wool grader, Stanley, and for you, the maker, reading this. We are able to commit to paying growers a consistent year-over-year, above fair market rate for wool that isn’t influenced by how the market is responding to the state of the world; this is due in no small part to everyone who chooses and who continues to create with our yarn. Others who are buying wool both here in the Navajo Nation, and domestically in the US right now in general, will not, or cannot.  

We reflect often on what it takes to bring a skein of Peace Fleece yarn into the world, and what it means to offer “wool with purpose” in 2025. We are an extremely small sliver of the annual wool buying in the Navajo Nation; an even slimmer one in the domestic wool market. Although we cannot influence the price per pound the market says is fair, we hope to continue buying Navajo wool in a consistent way for years to come, and by extension, support the Diné College in their efforts to encourage producers who are still raising fine wool.

Despite the challenge in reporting optimism about the overall state of our domestic wool market at large, we are buoyed by the Diné families who raise these sheep. It seems more critical than ever to celebrate each step of the process with clarity and deeper understanding, and doing what we can with what we have available, wherever we can. Hope lives in the cleanest fleece Stanley has seen on this year’s wool buy, and for that we are grateful.  

As makers who knit, weave, spin, or otherwise work with wool at the individual level, our craft provides an intimate understanding that things like wool—the tending, growing, processing, spinning of, and then creating with it—require a long view. These are careful, slow processes with planning, risk, and reward. And learning moments all along the way. We'll see this wool again: after it’s baled at the Diné College, it will go to a scouring facility in Texas for washing. We receive the clean wool in New Hampshire and supplement it with more fine wool, usually from Ohio, plus mohair to complete the Peace Fleece formula.  

After that, it heads to the dye house to create our stock palette, and finally, the now vibrantly-colored wool returns to our mill here in Harrisville to be carded into Peace Fleece's 40 different color blends and spun into yarn, with some of the carded fleece kept unspun for use in needle felting and other crafts.

If you find yourself in possession of a skein of Peace Fleece from our latest batch, we hope you’ll think of the cleanest fleece we saw this year. It’s very much alive in that yarn.  

written by Whitney Hayward and Leila Raven