Script for
Episode 157:
Breed School is Back
Breed School is back. But where did it go? Hi there, darling Sheepspotter.
Welcome to episode 157 of the Sheepspot podcast. It's great to be back. Today, I am going to tell you a little bit about the history of Breed School, my 12-month breed study course, what it is, where it came from, and it's been really interesting to me as I've been getting ready to relaunch Breed School in this new form, and I'll tell you all the details about that soon, because Breed Study is really where Sheepspot started. A million years ago in 2010, I was taking all the spinning classes that I could find. And Deb Robeson, the author of the, or the co-author, excuse me, of the Fleece and Fiber Sourcebook, came to teach at the Spinning Loft in Michigan, which is about three hours from where I live. So I went and I took her class because I was just taking all the classes. I really had no particular interest in this class. I didn't really know about breed study.
I pretty much thought wool was wool at that point. I'd only been spinning for just over a year, and I really did not know what to expect from the class at all. And when I got there, Deb, who is a very magnetic personality and who is so passionate about sheep, Deb had us spinning all kinds of wool, many of which I had never even heard of, let alone touched before. And as we were spinning them, Deb was telling us.
About the history of the breeds, where they came from geographically, what other breeds they were related to, the characteristics of their wool, and all that good stuff. And she talked a lot in that class about rare breeds and breeds that were endangered.
There were two major surprises for me in that class. One was that I loved almost all of the wools that we spun for different reasons. I was able to find something that I loved in each one of them. And the second surprise was that some of the wolves that I loved the most came from sheep that were the most endangered, that we are most in danger of losing. And at the time, I was hosting another spinning podcast, which was called Spin Doctor. And I left Deb's class so fired up about rare breeds and about the urgency of preserving these sheep that I immediately came home, made a podcast episode, and I created this contest that actually got written up briefly in Spinoff Magazine at the time, in which I challenged my listeners to do a Breed Study with me with a focus specifically on breeds that were listed either by the Livestock Conservancy in the U.S. Or the Rare Breed Survival Trust in the U.K. Those are two organizations that are working to preserve rare and endangered livestock breeds.
There's a lot to be said about the importance of these rare breeds, not just of sheep, but of cows and chickens and all the domesticated animals that we grow on farms and rely on for food. There's a lot to be said about why those breeds are so important to the food supply and why inbreeding is a threat to the food supply. I'm not really going to talk about any of that today, but I am going to be talking about it during a live class that I'm going to be teaching on Saturday, the 14th of June, and Sunday, the 15th of June. So if you want to come to that and learn more about why genetic diversity in farm animals is so important, why it's so important to the food supply, I will put a link to that class in the show notes. But today, I just want to talk more about the importance of these breeds for spinners, for our self-expression as spinners, and about the importance of having these materials continue to be available for us.
Different breeds of wool and different breeds of sheep are very, very different from one another, so it's really important that we have the full range of them available to us. And so I ran that contest through the podcast. I got a lot of people interested in rare breeds. It was extremely satisfying. It was a great activity to do with my listeners, and it was a really great thing for me as a spinner because it just built my skills so much working with these different breeds.
When I started Sheep Spot, it was originally going to be a yarn company, and the idea was that I was going to find sources for rare breed fleeces, buy them and have them made into yarn, dye them, and sell them. For a variety of reasons, that turned out to be much more complicated and difficult than I thought it would be. And I also discovered that I really, really love dyeing fiber. I enjoy dyeing fiber much more than yarn. It's a much less exacting process, so you can be a lot more playful with it. And I also remembered that I'm really here in the world to serve spinners. So about two years into Sheepspot, we made the transition away from yarn, and we just focused on dyeing wool. And stocking a variety of rare breeds, dyeing a variety of rare breeds, and especially breeds that a lot of other dyers weren't working with at the time. That was a really important part of Sheepspot's mission.
The first iteration of Breed School came pretty early on in Sheepspot. It was probably 2016-ish, and it was a dyed fiber club. Every other month, I offered two different club colorways. I wanted to give people a choice, and I sent out a different breed in each shipment. That was the first version of Breed School. And then the following year, I think I added in some more support for people around spinning the wool. So I started to do video demonstrations of spinning them myself.
And we started to have meetups to talk about them. So that was the very first version of Breed School, which I now think of as Breed School 1.0. And the problem with the 1.0 version was that it wasn't very scalable. I had to keep it quite small, because dyeing for the club took me a couple of weeks out of every month. And so that meant that was time I couldn't spend dyeing for fiber festivals or for the shop. So it was pretty limited. And in 2020, at the start of the pandemic, I came up with the idea for Breed School version 2.0. And 2.0 was a fiber subscription and also a spinning course. And I decided for that version to use undyed fiber so that I could eliminate the bottleneck of dyeing, free up dyeing time for other projects, and also just make the course available to a lot more people.
And since we sent out undyed fiber, we could ship every month. So the subscription went from six breeds to 12. And I created video sampling lessons for each breed in which I spun them four or five different ways and then finished my samples and talked about which one of them I liked best. I also included bonus lessons each month on related spinning topics. And I created a workbook and I added a community component.
The problem was, and here we get into talking about something that I very rarely talk about publicly, which is kind of the back end of entrepreneurship and running a business. At the time, I just didn't really know my numbers that well. And it turned out that I was not charging enough to make this new version of Breed School in this new iteration, even a little bit profitable. The first year, I lost quite a bit of money on it. And then I raised the price the second year and I still lost money on it. And my account was like, dude, you know, you've got to figure this out. So I did breed school, the second, the 2.0 iteration three times in 2020, 2021, and 2022.
And I raised the price each time, but the cost of just the fiber handling, just the packaging of the fiber, weighing it all out and labeling it and shipping, it was a huge amount of work. I had to hire people to help me do it and finally in 2023 I just decided okay I really can't afford to do this again and even though it was a project that was extremely near and dear to my heart and even though I knew it was getting really great results for the people who were going through it I just decided that it had to go and I was also just pretty exhausted at the time trying to run a dye studio and a podcast and a spinners community, it just felt like something had to give. So that was when I decided to really simplify things, close my dye studio and just focus on teaching and running my community.
So two years passed without breed school, and I just really started to miss it. And really, what I missed about it was being in a position to cultivate excitement about breed study, which I'm really, really passionate about. I think it's one of the best ways to become a really good spinner. And I particularly love facilitating other people discovering rare breeds. In the 15 years since I took that class with Deb Robeson, there have been some breeds that have actually, breeds on conservation lists, that have started to recover. And I think spinners have had a lot to do with that. Sometimes when I'm feeling grandiose, I even think that maybe I had a little bit to do with that. It's just always been really important to me, the preservation of these breeds, and I love introducing them to other people. And also, I was talking to students who had gone through the course and hearing how important it was to them and how formative the class had been for them as a spinner. So I started to think, okay, is there a different way to do this? And so what I hit upon was a third iteration of Breed School, which is what I'm going to be running this year for the first time. And it's going to be open later this month in June 2025.
The new version of Breed School, which I think of as Breed School 3.0, is a bring-your-own-fiber version. So I am not shipping out fiber to anybody, but I have worked with a couple of suppliers to develop kits for the course that contain all the breeds that we're going to study. So students can buy themselves the kit, and they will get a sampling lesson in which I demonstrate spinning that month's wool for each of the 12 breeds. And they will also get a bonus lesson every month. And I'm thinking a little bit differently about the bonus lessons this time around. I want them to be more closely related to breed study.
And I'm also wanting to provide more of a bridge for people who really get excited about breeds into what I think of as the next stage of breed study for people, which is buying fleeces and prepping them and spinning them. It's important to me that in breed school, we work with prepared fibers because I want to lower the barrier to entry as much as I can to get people excited about these breeds. But the next step is really working with fleeces because there are lots of wonderful breeds that you really can't get as processed fiber anywhere. I don't know of any place you can get Clund Forest, for example, which is one of my absolute favorite breeds. I don't know of any place you can get Ryland, another one of my favorite breeds. And so if you're really going to pursue breed study over the long haul, or if you're just particularly attached to one of these breeds that's not available in commercially prepped form, then you need to figure out the whole fleece piece. So in the second half of the class, the bonus lessons are going to be about sourcing fleeces, then actually choosing them, scouring, prep, the whole nine yards. So that by the end of the course, people will have both a wide experience of breeds of different wool types, and they will also have all the information that they need in order to progress to the next stage and work with fleeces.
During Breed School 2.0, we discovered how important it was to have a community element for breed study because some breeds are just kind of gnarly, and it can be easy to think that it's you. But if you're in community with other people as you're doing breed study, you know that, no, it's not me, it's Herdwick. It's not that your spinning has completely fallen apart. Herdwick is just quite a challenging breed to spin. We're actually not gonna do Herdwick in the 3.0 version. But anyway, so this time around, we're also gonna build in monthly live events for the community, office hours with one of my favorite humans on the planet and one of my advanced spinning students. She is also gonna host a meetup monthly so that people have an opportunity to share their yarns and talk about the experience and troubleshoot and also to talk about what they're gonna do with their yarns, because that's another thing that people struggle with with some of these breeds is figuring out, okay, what's the situation in which I would actually use this wool?
So I think that the live meetings, they're going to be two a month, are really going to supplement the course in a great way. And I'm really excited about that. I'm so grateful that my student, Bridget, has agreed to work with me on this. We were on the phone yesterday. It was really, really fun. And I'm just really excited that Sheepspot is going back to its sheepy roots and its obsession with rare breeds.
Because let me tell you, I've been doing some research for this live class that I'm going to teach on the 14th and 15th about genetic diversity in livestock, and it's reminded me, not that I ever forgot exactly, but it's reminded me of how important breed study is to the preservation of these rare breeds of sheep. But it's also important in a lot of other ways, too, that we don't necessarily think of. Yeah, it's nice to have teeswater fiber to spin, but there's more to it than that. We don't know what we're losing when we lose these breeds, so that's what I'm going to be talking about on the 14th and 15th. Come and join me for that. And if you're interested in breed study, you should join me also for my free workshop on breed study, which starts tomorrow, actually, on the 6th of June.
It's a little taster for folks considering breed school, so you can get a sense of my teaching style and see if breed school is right for you. But even if you don't sign up for the course, what I try to do in the free workshop is give you all the tools that you would need to get started on breed study on your own. So just give you some conceptual frameworks and some strategies that will enable to do it on your own if that's what you choose to do. So go and sign up for the free workshop. It's called Breed Study 101. I'll put a link to that in the show notes as well. Even if you're not interested in the course or the free workshop, though, I would love to have the opportunity to talk to you a little bit about genetic diversity in livestock and why we really, really need rare sheep breeds. Some of the reasons may surprise you. And again, that's what I'm going to be talking about on the 14th and 15th. Of this month, June 2025. There is a dedicated discussion thread in The Flock where you can comment on this episode and discuss it with me and other listeners. The link is in the show notes for this episode, which you'll find right inside your podcast app. So just open up the description, click the link, and you'll be taken right to the thread.
If you haven't joined The Flock, Sheepspot's free online community for hand spinners. You should. You'll get access to all of the freebies that I've created for the podcast, as well as three self-guided spinning challenges, our weekly spinning check-ins every Friday, lots more. It's all at theflock.sheepspot.com, and it's completely free. So, darling Sheepspotter, that is it for me this week. Thank you so much for listening. I'll be back next week. And next week, I will be talking about reasons to start a breed study. So come back for that episode. You don't want to miss it. And until then, I have a suggestion for you. It will surprise you. My suggestion is that you spin something because it's going to do you good.