Like many small businesses, Belfast Mini Mills was born out of frustration. When its founders wanted to do something, but found they couldn’t, they didn’t accept it as just one more of life’s frustrations. Sheila Sutherland describes their response differently.

“This is ridiculous.”

It was 1990. Sheila and her husband Lawrence were living in Rock Creek, in the British Columbia interior, tending a flock of about 90 head of sheep and operating Mountain Loom Company, which made and sold looms to crafters.

What Sheila Sutherland found ridiculous was a gaping hole in the middle of the process for making their own end product. They could grow their wool, they could weave their cloth, but they could not get yarn made from their own wool. She had tried, sending her wool to a mill in Alberta.

“I knew when I got my fibre back it wasn’t mine,” she said. It was not the quality she was expecting given the wool her own animals were producing. “In the big mills, they mix all of the fibre that they get in from everywhere, all in one. So that, just that moment, was when the idea came.”

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