The place to come for top-quality, pure natural yarns

Blacker Designs is the new brand name of The Natural Fibre Company which runs a specialist wool mill at Launceston on the Devon-Cornwall border.

The company's reputation has been built by adding value to fleeces supplied by farmers and turning them into high-quality knitting yarn. To encourage its customers to experiment with different yarns, it has issued some free patterns.

Increasingly, the company is buying raw wool from sheep breeders, processing it and using the yarns for its own specially-developed, branded range of products including throws, cushions, blankets, scarves and blankets which are on sale at the on-line shop.

Some of the knitting yarn it produces is unique and cannot be acquired elsewhere. Many of the products are limited editions simply because no more suitable wool is available until shearing next takes place. Most of the wool is sourced in the UK, but a small amount comes from the Falkland Islands. All the yarn used in the products is processed at the mill in Cornwall.

Although the Blacker Designs brand was only launched in November 2008, the company has established itself as the place to go for top-quality yarn which many knitters find difficult to source. As customers also want to know more about natural fibre and how it is produced we have added a section on Education with some useful additional links. 

The company has been spinning wool in small quantities since 1991, but was taken over by Sue Blacker and her family in 2005 and with the help of European grant funding re-located in South West.

Sue is pictured right with some of her flock of Gotland sheep. The one getting all the attention answers to the name Harry!

Over the last three years the company has started a minor revolution in the industry by carrying out almost all the traditional industrial processes on a small, but commercial scale. Worsted spinning was added in 2007 and during the summer of 2008 a dye plant was installed.