London City Farm Yarn Project

Sustainable knitwear designer Justine Lee of Ossian Knitwear started The London City Farm Yarn project to create quality yarn from the many rare breed sheep living at London’s city farms. 
 
Social Farms and Gardens helped knit the farms together in this collaboration, inviting Justine to present the project at the 2024 London Harvest Festival at Lambourne End Adventure Centre, and encouraging partnerships with Mudchute Park and Farm, Spitalfields City Farm, Stepney City Farm, Surrey Docks Farm, Vauxhall City Farm, Wellgate Community Farm, and Woodlands Farm.  
 
The project is now well underway with the beautiful wool from these farms having been combined into 300 kilos of good quality traditionally processed yarn. This was quite an epic task and Justine worked really hard to find the right processing partners and even drove aromatic unprocessed fleece up the M1! 
 
The wool will continue to be processed into handknit skeins as part of knitting or crochet packs for sale at the city farms before Easter.   
 
Justine is busy designing the range of products for city farms to sell and will be setting up a Kickstarter to raise money to create a video to educate people about the project.  

You can find out more about the project and view some gorgeous videos of the process at https://www.instagram.com/londoncityfarmyarn/ https://www.instagram.com/socialfarmsandgardens/  

The picture is of Justine, on the left, with Mr and Mrs Bolton, at London Harvest Festival 2024.  David Bolton is a past Master of the Worshipful Company of Farmers.