Wow! It’s been quite some time since we’ve sent out any message to our customers. Summer is typically slow and we help to insure that by laying low and trying to sneak off to the beach of the golf course (depending upon who) as much as possible. While we’ve been quiet here it has really been anything but quiet behind the scenes. While this post is meant to announce our new Sampler Product which has 9 of our types for you to try at one handy delivered price, there is really more we have to say!
Welcome to Grace Ellen Lindsay! Daughter of President Phil Lindsay she’s dipping her toe into the water that is a family business. The Sampler is her idea and generally we’ve been letting her work out all the fun stuff it takes to create and offer a new product. Boy have we been having fun!
Grace brings with her a life time of exposure to wool and the wool industry. R.H. Lindsay moved into 16 Mather Street way back in February 1989 and Grace came home to 16 Mather in March. We had the wool stowed in the barn out back and the office in the basement. Phil would bring infant Grace on sales calls with great success.
Over the years of course it never occurred to Phil that Grace might actually be interested in the family business. Given the throws of world wool textile markets it wasn’t particularly attractive anyway. However the past 10 years we’ve focused more on developing the craft side of the business. Meanwhile Grace graduated from Pitt with an engineering degree and she’s been out in the ‘real world’ working her way up the institutional/corporate ladder at MIT. Well compared to the brainiacs at MIT, the typical R.H. Lindsay Company customer proved to be a lot more interesting to Grace. So here we are!
Check out our new Sampler Box on sale at an Introductory $25.00 (until Phil’s birthday). It includes 9 various types from our inventory. We’ve woven a few lessons about wool processing, breed and color into the offering. We’re showing a few NEW things as well as more unusual types.
Also, if this Sampler Box doesn’t sound like it is for you and you have your own ideas, let us know. We’re on Facebook or Instagram. You could also e-mail, call or mail us a note. We’re eager to hear from you. While dozens of box orders would be best, it is fine if we hear dozens of other comments at well.
So here’s the current narrative of what you get if you order our first ever Sampler Box!
Here’s our FIRST Ever sampler. We curated a varied selection of our products for folks to get a feel for our products. We’ve always said that wool is a tactile sport and we’ve been a little lax in the sampling department. This will be the first of a continuing series of sample boxes, so we would love your feedback to help us curate
We decided a lesson in wool and how it looks at varying stages would be a good start. We chose to highlight three types of Churro from straight scoured to a carded sliver and finally a dehaired version. We’ve seen spinners make rugs using the scoured version. The 21DK or carded sliver will show how well the scoured cleans up. It is used by a lot of our customers who weave rugs. The Dehaired Churro was aimed at being a super soft (with the straight fiber removed) fine type only it came up a little coarser than we hoped, but still pretty soft so we hope you enjoy it!
The middle row is from our wool top collection. We saw that our top supplier was offering a U.S. Grown Rambouillet type that matched our lonnnnnnnnng time favorite #48 Australian Merino Top and here it is for you to try. This year we added two types from Spain that we are very excited about. The 27D Spanish Merino Comeback Natural Brown comes from a cooperative in Spain that represents the ORIGINAL developers of the Merino Breed. They have brown fiber sheep to keep count in their large flocks and we’ve been mining their stockpile. The 747 Dyed Black Spanish Merino Comeback is available at a super price for dyed wool and it represents (for now) the only dyed shade we offer.
Any sampler needs to include multiple blends from our 20-series line of Carded Sliver. We have the wool scoured at one mill and move it to another for carding into sliver. We highlight breeds and shades as we assemble them. The 21D is our Crossbred Romney/Leicester collection and it is a standard type we’ll have forever. The 22SSD is a Super Soft Merino Comeback Off-white style we got from a Midwestern wool grower who has one of the most well grown flocks in the country. It is Merino fineness at 22.5 but it was originally bred with a Romney base for the color. The 23D is one of our grey shades and is a good example of New England farm raised Crossbred white and colored fleece. We blend varying percentages of color into the white to make as many as 6 other shades in the 21D-range which signifies locally sourced wool grown in New England or the Mid-Atlantic states.