Frequently
Asked Questions
Get help with ordering, delivery, and returns.
If you have further questions, please contact us.
General
General information about JFM
Working in the mill requires our undivided attention (and is also super loud) so we can only accept visitors by appointment.
If you're interested in a tour, email us at hello@junctionfibermill.com and we'll make sure to let you know when we add tours to our schedule.
Not at the moment. We do have Open Houses occasionally. Sign up for our Newsletter and follow us on social media for updates!
Our parking lot is behind 87 Maple Street. Coming from I-89, you will drive past Junction Fiber Mill and then turn left after Funkalicious. Do not park in the driveway directly to the left of our building.
We have a map with clear instructions on our Contact page.
You can find our most up-to-date price sheet on our Processing page here. (Click the link at the top to download the pdf)
Yarn
Information about our lines of yarn
Farm Fresh:
Our Farm Fresh line of yarn is made from wool sourced from small sheep farms in Vermont and New Hampshire. We process this yarn from start to finish here at the mill — from freshly shorn off the sheep’s back to finished hank. We know the farmer and sometimes even the individual sheep whose fiber make up these skeins. Sheep farms are important to our region’s health and history and we’re proud to support them with this line of yarn.
Farm Fresh Lux:
Sometimes we want to experiment with blending more “luxurious” fiber with our local sheep wool to give it a little extra something so we created this line of yarn which incorporates a small percentage of non-local fiber including silk, imported Merino, etc.
Making Tracks:
Making Tracks uses a blend of wool from finer breeds like Merino, Targhee and Corriedale sourced from flocks ranging from Idaho to western South Dakota. We don’t have the capacity in our small mill to scour and comb all the wool we need for this yarn so we use Chargeurs, one of the last industrial wool combing plants still in operation in the United States for this part of the process. We then hand dye, pin draft, spin, and finish the yarn here at the mill. This yarn is proudly 100% grown and produced in America and the wool is non-superwashed and non-mulesed.
Though we use mechanical equipment, our process is still very hands on and occasionally idiosyncrasies happen. We take great care to avoid slubs in our yarn but If you run into one, it can usually be teased out gently. A small percentage of our yarn will have a single knot where we have joined an end from one bobbin to another to wind off a full skein. We make sure to join yarns at matching color sections.
Please send us an email if you feel you’ve received a skein that has slipped past quality control and is too irregular.
Custom Processing
For more information about custom processing, see our Processing page.
Our carder requires that staple (fiber) length to be between 2 and 6 inches. Additionally, we cannot accept fiber from animals that have been bedded in wood shavings as they’re next to impossible to get completely out of a fleece and will ruin our carder.
You can find our most up-to-date price sheet and pricing information on our Processing page here. (Click the link at the top to download the pdf)
Download our Pricing & Order Form on our Processing page for the most up to date pricing and job minimums.
Note that a "job" is defined as a single fleece or batch of fleece that is processed together. An order can have multiple jobs and each must meet the minimum.
We never guarantee our turnaround times, but if you email us we can let you know what our current turnaround times are.
Our equipment requires that a job have some crimp for us to process it successfully. Breeds with high crimp like Jacob, Corriedale, Shetland, etc go through swimmingly on their own.
Lower crimp breeds like Border Leicester and Finn can occasionally be a challenge. Not all fleeces are consistent within a given breed, so it often comes down to the specific sheep. The solution we have found in these cases is to blend a small amount of wool with the necessary crimp to hold it together. We can assess your specific fleece when we see it in person.
For very low or no crimp breeds such as Gotland, Cotswold, and Teeswater we blend as a rule as they cannot go through on their own.
If you have a mix of different breeds of sheep, we recommend blending some of the crimpy breeds with the low crimp breeds to increase the chance of success. If not, we can provide a high quality domestic combed top at cost.
Don't hesitate to email us at hello@junctionfibermill.com if you have any other questions.
No, we only process sheep's wool. It's nothing personal, we just feel it's better to focus on doing one thing really well (though sheep's wool is a whole world unto itself).
Additionally we cannot process hair or dual coated breeds of sheep.
We reserve the right to reject any fleece for any reason.
No, we can only accept raw (skirted) fleece and we require it to go through our full process in one go (wash > pick > card > pin draft > spin). This is to ensure the best-quality end product as we can control humidity and treatment throughout.``
No. We offer our scouring (washing) services only as part of the roving/yarn processing service.
We are a "semi-worsted" mill, meaning we card (rather than comb) and then pin draft our fiber.
Check out our Processing page for a complete description of our process.
Regular roving is roving directly off of our carder, which definitely makes a nice enough roving for hand spinners and felters. The pin drafting process further aligns and evens out the roving. When we spin yarn here at the mill, we need the roving to be absolutely perfect, so we run it through our Pin Drafter at least twice. If you want to hand spin with the creme de la creme of roving, opt for Pin Drafting — it’ll make hand spinning a dream.