Barn to Yarn
Barn to Yarn
Everything you need to know to raise fiber animals and turn their fleeces into yarn.
How to weigh up the fiber species against each other. What each one asks of you in feed, fencing and routine care. What happens at shearing, and how to take a fleece all the way to finished yarn yourself.
Enroll in Barn to Yarn
The problem is not a shortage of information.
You can find an answer to almost any single question in about five minutes. A forum thread, a video, somebody's blog post from 2014.
What you cannot find is all of it in one place, in the order it actually happens, from one person who does the whole thing. So you end up assembling it yourself out of a dozen sources that disagree with each other, and you are never quite sure whether you have the full picture or only the parts that happened to come up.
That is the gap Barn to Yarn fills. Every stage, start to finish, taught the same way by the same person, so the feeding advice fits the fencing advice fits the shearing advice. Nothing contradicts itself and nothing is missing in the middle.
Fiber animals are not hard to keep.
They are hard to guess at.
One example
Goats need supplemental copper. Sheep are extremely sensitive to it.
Keep them together, buy one bag of minerals for both, and you can slowly poison your sheep. Nothing about that is obvious from the feed store shelf, and it is one of the most common beginner mistakes there is.
The costly mistakes all happen early.
Not on shearing day. They happen in the first few decisions, while everything still feels reversible, and you pay for them every year afterward.
The wrong species
Alpacas, Angora goats, Angora rabbits and sheep want completely different lives. Different fencing, shelter and demands on your time and your back. Choosing on looks and finding out later is the most expensive mistake in fiber farming.
Too many for the land
Overgraze and you get parasites, poor condition, thin fleece and a pasture that takes years to recover. Most people find their stocking rate by exceeding it.
Feeding by guesswork
Nutrition decides fleece quality months before shearing. A rough winter or a hard pregnancy puts a weak spot in the fiber that breaks during processing, and nothing fixes it afterward.
Fleece you cannot use
Hay fed from overhead, the wrong bedding, a rushed shearing, no skirting. By the time the fleece is in the bag, everything that decided its value has already happened.
Eleven modules. Nearly 50 lessons.
In the order you will need them. It starts before you own anything, because every stage decides what is possible in the next one.
Planning your fiber farm
Hobby or business, budgeting and time, land and infrastructure, legal, zoning and permits.
Choosing your animals
Comparing fiber species, alpacas, Angora goats, Angora rabbits and sheep, and picking the right fit for you.
Housing and care
Feeding by species, shelter and fencing, routine care and breeding, vet care, mixed herds and transport.
Shearing and fiber basics
Shearing tools or hiring out, skirting and evaluating fleece, keeping vegetable matter out, fiber terms and types.
Prepping and spinning
Washing, picking and carding, wheels versus spindles, using a fiber mill.
Selling your products
What you can sell, pricing your products, building your fiber business.
Printable worksheets, checklists and activities throughout.
Can these animals pay for themselves?
Yes! But only on the far side of a lot of decisions made correctly.
Take one animal with five pounds of usable fleece. Sold raw at around twelve dollars a pound, that is sixty dollars. Sent to a mill and turned into yarn, those same five pounds come back as roughly twelve skeins. At twenty eight dollars a skein that is about three hundred and thirty six dollars, less around ninety in mill costs.
One animal. Every year, for as long as you have her.
And if you are not selling anything at all, run it the other direction and count what you spend on roving and yarn in a year while standing in a barn full of the raw material for it.
I took this workshop live and it was worth every penny. Claudia has done her research and is a wealth of knowledge with raising fiber animals. I highly recommend!
Cindy S.
What you walk away with
Every farm is different, so I am not going to hand you a plan. What I can hand you is everything you need to build your own, and the confidence that you are not missing something obvious.
A real understanding of what each species asks of you, so you can weigh them against your own land, climate, budget, and body instead of guessing.
A picture of what good feeding, fencing, shelter and routine care look like, and why each one matters to the fleece long before shearing day.
The hands-on skills to take a fleece the whole way yourself. Skirting, scouring, carding and spinning it into finished yarn, with demonstrations of each.
The vocabulary to talk to a shearer, a mill or a vet and be understood, which is worth more than people expect.
And the ability to spot an expensive decision while it is still a decision.
Enrollment closes August 24
Join Barn to Yarn
$297
Or four payments of about $74 with Shop Pay Installments. One payment, lifetime access, at your own pace.
Enroll in Barn to YarnAfter you check out I will send you an invitation by email, usually within a few hours. You will join the free Learn Fiber Arts community, click the Classroom tab, and Barn to Yarn will be waiting there.
Questions people actually ask
I do not have animals yet. Is it too early?
This is the best possible moment. Almost everything that decides whether your fiber farm works gets decided before you own anything. People who take this first buy the right animals once. People who take it afterward are usually working around choices they already paid for.
Honestly, $297 is a lot right now.
It is a real amount of money and I will not pretend otherwise. Compare it to what it stands between you and: animals that turn out wrong for your land, fencing built twice, a year of feeding that quietly ruins a clip, one animal lost to something you did not recognize in time. Any single one costs more than this does. Shop Pay Installments will also split it into four payments of about $74.
Which species does it cover?
Alpacas, Angora goats, Angora rabbits and sheep, compared side by side and then covered individually through feeding, care, shearing and fiber characteristics. I raise Giant Angoras and sheep here, so those examples come up often, but the course is built to help you choose between all four.
Will this teach me to spin?
Yes. You will learn to skirt a fleece, scour it, card it and spin it into yarn, with demonstrations of each step. The course is called Barn to Yarn because that is the whole distance it covers. What a course devoted to spinning alone would add is depth: every technique, every variation, the years of nuance inside that one skill. This gives you working knowledge of all the steps rather than mastery of one. Most people want that first, and plenty never need more than it.
Does this replace a vet?
No, and please do not let it. It helps you know what routine care looks like, what to watch for, and how to have a useful conversation with a vet who may not have much experience with your species. Emergencies still need a vet.