Slow wool challenge a rush for these crafty competitors

It’s late afternoon on a wintry Saturday in Bairnsdale, eastern Victoria, and a small crowd has gathered around a roped-off area of a textile craft store.

The onlookers have come to Liz Green Arts to watch seven expert hand spinners and knitters race against the clock with intense concentration.

The East Gippsland Wool and Craft Group is quietly taking part in the International Back to Back Wool Challenge, a worldwide event in which teams compete for the fastest time to blade-shear a sheep, spin the wool and knit a jumper within a day.

The team took first place in Australia in 2007, and second internationally, with a time of six hours, 10 minutes and eight seconds.

Another Australian team, from Merriwa in New South Wales, broke the five-hour barrier in 2004 and held the Guinness World Record for the event up until 2017 when the Netherlands beat the record by about six minutes, with a time of four hours 45 minutes and 53 seconds.

The competitors may be racing the clock, but their efforts are all about celebrating slow manufacturing, using locally grown and sustainably produced wool to make garments by hand from scratch.

Manufacturing by hand

The East Gippsland Wool and Craft Group kept a few sheep on standby in a pen for the challenge and a change of plan had them switch from white to brown sheep fleece.

“We had to set up fences for the sheep, we had a few options of sheep, but unfortunately two of them decided to roll in poop this morning so they were instantly disqualified, which is why we ended up with such a lovely brown fleece,” says Toni Collis, the group’s treasurer.

The poop indiscretion of the English Leicester cross costs the team an hour and half in blade-shearing time, and the clean fleece is retrieved and relayed to the group’s hand spinners.

The competition rules state that the sheep cannot be housed or clothed to protect the fleece and that the sheep and sheared fleece cannot be washed, leaving the fleece in its most natural, aromatic state — dirt and all.

Spinning wheels feature interchangeable bobbins to ensure a speedy workflow, as the wool is spun by two hand spinners then plied by a third.

The wool is then handed over to four knitters, who knit straight from the bobbins.

“There are four parts to the jumper: one front, one back, two sleeves,” Ms Collis says.

“Some of our faster knitters started on the pieces for our slower knitters earlier to get them going.”

Pieces of the jumper are swapped between faster and slower knitters to create consistent progress with the pieces, and knitters swap with spinners to avoid cramping with different muscles and movements.

This year the team is racing to try to finish within 10 hours.

Sustainable fibres

The Back to Back Wool Challenge plays into a broader movement of knitters and craft makers seeking locally grown, naturally produced fibres that haven’t been processed overseas with chemicals, dyes or synthetic additives.

As with the food, wine and paddock-to-plate movement, wool connoisseurs want to know the story behind the products they are purchasing, their carbon footprint in freight, and processing, and are prepared to pay more for a premium, sustainably produced product.

Wool producer Julianne Sargant is the daughter of a 90-year-old merino sheep farmer based in Omeo and was a spectator at this year’s challenge.

Ms Sargant says that events like Back to Back help people appreciate the effort that goes into creating fibres.

“When you actually do this yourself, you realise the effort that it takes to actually create fibre,” she says.

The Back to Back event is a little different from Ms Sargant’s usual process.

Turning her father’s 18 micron merino wool into yarn, she hand dyes it across a number of cauldrons, inspiring the Woollen Witchery brand name.

“I hand dye with plants from the farm and the garden, like gum leaves, and I grow my own indigo and marigolds, and I use Omeo gum, blue gum and narrow-leaved peppermint to colour wool,” she says.

Ms Sargant says her father has spent his life breeding sheep and mitigating seasonal variations in their fibres by providing the right mix of nutrition.

The best wool is selected, 200 kilograms of it is sent to one of two remaining commercial scouring facilities in Australia, EP Robinson in Geelong, where it is commercially washed to remove any lanolin grease that may clog machinery.

It is then sent on to Cashmere Connections at Bacchus Marsh, where it is turned into a fluffy tube of aligned fibres known as “tops”.

The wool then either heads to the Great Ocean Road Woollen Mill in Ballarat, or the Adagio Woollen Mill in the Blue Mountains for further processing before returning to Omeo as skeins of wool.

It can be a two-year process to create the wool and a skein costs upwards of $30.

“It’s the quality of the product and it’s the traceability. You know where it’s come from,” Ms Sargant says.

Garments worn for a lifetime

While the East Gippsland Wool and Craft Group hoped to return Australia to the top of the international rankings, this year it didn’t pan out.

The fastest team was the US’s San Diego County Spinners, who took out top spot in the worldwide challenge with a time of seven hours and 12 minutes.

The East Gippsland Wool and Craft Group came seventh with a time of 13 hours, eight minutes and 21 secs, while raising $300 for a local children’s cancer charity in the process.

Ms Sargent says locally produced wool — like that highlighted at Back to Back — is popular at wool shows attended by “yarn addicts”.

Some of the more popular events are the Canberra Wool Expo, the Coburg Market and the Bendigo Sheep and Wool Show.

Ms Sargant says people who make their own garments using locally produced wool are less likely to throw them away, resulting in a more sustainable lifestyle.

“If it doesn’t leave this shore you’re saving all those carbon miles to start with,” she says.