About Us

Welcome to The Silly Sheep Fibre Co 

We are a small traditional croft on the Westside of Shetland Mainland.

"We" are myself - Becky   Crofter, shepherdess, wool processor & dyer, shop keeper, talk giver, baker, the list goes on & thinker up of the next bit to add to the slightly crazy but fullfilling life that we have !

My Husband Ian - long suffering, incredibly supportive, fulltime working, part-time crofter & wise head for some of my more crazy ideas !!

Our 2 grown up sons - one who lives at home & helps out daily & works part-time in the village school  & one who lives near Lerwick & comes help on his days off.

My Dad - he moved to Shetland a couple of yrs ago to be closer, he helps out with the croft, moves sheep for me in his trailer, is the technical voice in quite a few of my crazier plans & is the person who has constructed almost everything on this croft that isnt held together with cable ties & string !                                          When he isn't helping us, he looks after poorly bats, watches for & records whales & dolphins & has a generally hectic retirement !

We have a 25 acre croft which by Shetland standards is small. Our ground is a mix of shallow soil & clay on bedrock & peaty bogs  with some relativley reasonable bits inbetween !                                                                                    We are lucky enough to have some amazing archaeology, with approx 4000 yrs of occupation, some which is very visable & some that I hope one day we will excavate.

When we moved to Shetland in 2019, we brought a mixed flock of sheep with us, a few Shetlands, Hebrideans, Hebridean cross & the last 3 Scottish Blackface that we started our flock with. Over the years, for a few reasons these have all gone except 1 Hebridean, our wool flock is now 100% Shetland. We have a handful of other sheep of other breeds, 1 Suffolk, 1 Vailais Blacknose x Shetland & 2 Shetland x Cheviots.                                                                                              We were already producing our own knitting wools & that has been tweaked & developed over the past few years. We still have some of our mixed flock wool & are currently developing some ready made products with it.

Home to happy sheep & their beautiful fleeces.

The Silly Sheep fibre company is a small family croft enterprise, on  the West Mainland of Shetland in the village of Walls.

We started producing our own knitting wools while we were living in the Outer Herbrides to give our growing sheep family a purpose.

Our first 6 Scotttish Blackface lambs, all orphans arrived in 2013, by 2017 we also had 9 Hebridean sheep. Having already experimented with the Blackface wool, we decided to have the Hebridean fleeces made in to knitting wool. That lead on to being  given or buying other local fleeces to make up the quantity needed for the mill. Wool is addictive & one batch of yarn lead onto experimenting with natural dyes & with mixing breeds to give different yarns.

We now have 74 sheep, mainly Shetlands and a few Shetland x Hebridean some who moved to Shetland with us nearly 3 yrs ago including a lovely old Scottish Blackface ewe who was one of our original orphan lambs from 2013. We don't add her wool to out knitting fibre as it is now to course but it doesn't go to waste.

For the last 3  years we have used beautiful local Shetland rams who have produced lots of lovely lambs, they will provide us with beautiful fleeces for the next few years. We sadly no longer have our Hebrideans but still have some of their offspring.

We now use our own fleeces and some from other local crofts to have  batches of white & natural coloured knitting yarns produced, also fibres for spinning, weaving and felting.

All of the dyeing is done by us in small batches in our workshop.

Meet The Flock, Our Shetland sheep and friends