The Southwest Fiber Alliance

Background Statement

A group of people gathered in Bayfield CO in 2015 to discuss the need for a wool processing mill. This group consisted of ranchers with fiber animals (sheep mostly, but also alpaca & llama) as well as people who use yarn & other wool products. They had difficulty using their raw wool, with no mills close by and shipping to mills was expensive. Plus, wait times at mills were commonly 6 months to a year turn around time. This is all true today, and wool processing mills are still very much needed.

This group called themselves the Los Pinos Fiber Alliance & formed a non-profit in 2016. They gathered a lot of information, made a map of ranches in the greater area, identifying the types and number of all the fiber animals. They held many meetings & raised a lot of interest in building a mill.

K Knutsen (current member) saw the flyer they created at a Four Corners Weavers Guild meeting around that time but she didn’t follow up since she was living in Utah at the time. After moving to Bayfield she looked into what happened with the mill effort. M Lunsford (current member) was also looking into the mill effort at the same time . They met up in 2020 & resurrected the idea of building a wool mill, renaming the group The Southwest Fiber Alliance.