The benefits of wrapping yourself in a woollen blanket this winter

Alison Ross is bringing together sheep farmers from across Taranaki, one thread at a time as she works at her loom.

A keen weaver, Ross told Country Life she was tired of hearing how farmers both here and abroad were getting such poor returns for their wool, such a wonderful natural fibre.

She decided to do something about it, launching her own Taranaki Blanket made from locally grown wool.

"Someone said to me 'are you really gonna have a woollen mill in the middle of all those dairy farmers'."

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Ross' love of wool came later in life. She grew up surrounded by dairy farmers kids from around the mountain and always thought of Taranaki as a dairy producing region.

Marrying a shepherd she soon learned more about the region's sheep farmers, helping in various woolsheds as a rousey.

Each year she would pick out a nice hogget fleece for handspinning and said her passion for wool "grew from there".

"You can't help but feel joyful handling beautiful raw fleece wool."

Her knowledge of the fibre only deepened as she spent the last few years travelling around Europe, where she learned more about the history of loom mills and spoke to local farmers.

"Some of them to look at for me who had been a bit spoiled brought up on lovely Romney fleeces, I would look at them and think 'golly, this is a breed that the whole history of this area right back to Medieval times is built on'. And I'd look at it and go 'really?'.

"I've had to pull back my ideas and realise some breeds need a bit more prep. What you can get out of them at the end can be gorgeous."

While the sheep were different, the challenges they faced were largely the same as those in New Zealand - farmers getting "next to nothing" for their wool.

Returning to Taranaki about a year ago, Ross launched The Taranaki Blanket.

"It was really about celebrating strong wool. The whole thing about it being scratchy, well this isn't," she said, cuddling up to one of her cream woollen blankets. "It's washed up beautifully soft."

Still in pre-production, it will be a yearly run of pure wool blankets made from Taranaki grown Romney-cross hogget wool. Hoggets being young adult sheep, Ross said their first fleeces are some of the best.

Currently, the blankets are left their natural white - the colour of washed wool - with a yellow edging thread around the border. A logo in the matching yellow and black, a nod to the local Taranaki Bulls rugby union team, featuring the Taranaki maunga, surrounding highways and grazing sheep.

She sources the fleeces direct from Taranaki woolsheds, picking them out as they go.

"It was very important for me to throw the fleeces and skirt them really well."

The wool is taken to Napier where it is scoured and spun, before being returned to Taranaki where Ross weaves it into blankets on her wooden floor loom.

Using a flying shuttle - a boat-shaped device that holds a bobbin of weft thread (horizontal threads) which is passed through the warp threads (vertical threads) of a loom - she can do a metre a day and is hard at work weaving together the blankets.

Ross credits it as a key invention as cottage industry became more industrialised and eventually gave way to the loom mills.

She said mechanical looms were faster and could do "metres and metres and metres a day". She's currently on the lookout for a 19th tappet loom to help text her project to the next level.