NJ Fibershed: Helping Wasted Wool Become Homegrown Yarn

People often think of New Jersey as an offshoot of New York City, and Jerseyites jokingly ask each other which exit off the Turnpike they live at. In fact, though, the Garden State is still home to over 750,000 acres of farmland and an increasing number of small farmsteads.

One of them, in the town of Bedminster (yes, that Bedminster), is home to Anne Choi, her family, and a flock of a dozen Shetland sheep. “The majority of folks raising sheep in New Jersey have them for tax assessment benefits and breed lambs to sell to 4-H clubs,” Choi recently told me. “Having your flock’s wool processed requires some background knowledge, upfront capital to pay for the processing, and then a platform for selling products. Without those things in place, the result is a heartbreaking amount of wool being dumped into the New Jersey woods.”

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NJ Fibershed Is Born

This frustration led Choi to the idea of creating the NJ Fibershed. “I would frequently receive two types of phone calls and emails,” she shared. “The first from farmers asking how to process their fleeces, and the second from knitters, spinners, and dyers asking where to source local farm wool. My goal for NJ Fibershed was to bridge that disconnect between people with small flocks of fiber animals and fiber artists.”

One of the goals of the NJ Fibershed is connecting fiber artists with local fiber farms.

Choi began by registering NJ Fibershed as an affiliate member of the national organization, Fibershed.org. One of the resources the founding group provides is a website template, which made it relatively easy to build NJ Fibershed’s own site. “Fibershed.org also holds monthly affiliate meetings,” she said. And there is an interactive map on their site that shows the location of every registered Fibershed affiliate, not just nationally, but globally.

NJ Fibershed is governed by a dedicated board of directors who volunteer their time to organize NJ Fibershed’s educational programs and events. The board comprises fiber growers and fiber artists who all share a passion for building community around their love of fiber arts.

Urban Roots

While Choi grew up in mostly urban environments—she was born in Seoul, South Korea, and her family later resided in Baltimore—she has had a lifelong interest in fiber and textiles and is currently researching traditional Korean textile traditions. She and her family moved to the Garden State in 2014, and Choi was happy to learn that she is not the only urban transplant to rural New Jersey who is passionate about fiber farming. “I was surprised to find that most people raising fiber animals in NJ are first-generation farmers like me. Most of us were learning as we went along,” she says.

Photo by Jodi Griesing

It turns out New Jersey is the perfect locale for connecting with folks who Choi calls the “farm-curious.” Being Asian, she knows first-hand that “gaining farming knowledge and finding opportunities for hands-on farm experience can be challenging for those of us who don’t conform to people’s expectations of what a sheep farmer looks like.” Hence, a large part of the NJ Fibershed’s credo is inclusivity. As Choi puts it, “At NJ Fibershed we want everyone to be able to explore their fiber-farm dreams. Our hope is to create an intentional, safe, and welcoming space to nurture a diverse and equitable community of fiber producers.”

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Branching Out

While fiber animals are at the heart of the organization, the group has a growing focus on plant fibers and natural dyeing, which is driving some new programs in 2025. One of them is the NJ Fibershed Harvest Initiative. Choi says, “We are starting community gardens where members can grow fiber plants and natural-dye plants. The communal gardens will offer fiber artists a space to connect with the land, to experience their craft from seed to textile.” In addition to cultivating gardens, there will be educational programming throughout the growing season with workshops on plant care, natural dyeing, and the processing of plant fibers.

Members display their projects completed during the annual fiber-along event.

The NJ Fibershed also hosts an annual fiber-along, which is a series of virtual presentations that runs from January through August. This year’s focus is also on plant fibers. Anne Choi says, “The fiber-along is a fun community-building educational program. Each month we’re joined by a special guest for a talk about the cultivation and processing of plant fibers such as cotton, ramie, hemp, and abaca.”

What the Future Holds

Choi is excited about NJ Fibershed’s future. In 2024, the group became a New Jersey 501(c)(3) nonprofit educational organization. “Going forward, we’re looking into ways to fund paid positions. We’ve accomplished so much as volunteers, and it’s exciting to think of what we could do with a paid staff!”

To learn more about the NJ Fibershed, or to join, visit njfibershed.com. There are four levels of membership: Fiber Producer, Artisan, Guild, and Community Supporter. To keep up with their activities and see cute animal shots and fiber porn, follow @nj_fibershed on Instagram.

As an aside . . .

Garden State Cotton

The NJ Fibershed Community Cotton Project started last spring when Anne Choi was at her local dairy picking up milk. “I noticed that the farmer was growing a plot of cotton! I asked him about it, and he said he was just experimenting to see if he could grow cotton this far north.” He had no plans for the cotton, so the Fibershed organized some cotton harvests.

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“With the cotton we harvested, we will work with local spinning and weaving guilds to share cotton for spinners to spin, and then send the yarn to weavers. With the woven squares we get back, we plan to sew a community quilt.” Their goal is to involve as many local hands as possible in the creation of a truly home-grown project.