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The Last Shearing · A Farm Profile

For seventeen years she has turned the wool nobody wanted into something people give as Christmas presents. On 31 December, the fields her sheep graze stop being hers to use.

Why a 71-year-old shepherd in Suffolk is selling the last boxes of her sheep-faced wool tumble dryer balls for £25 – and why there will not be another shearing.

By Harriet Pole · Debenham, Suffolk · 22 October 2026 · A 7-minute read

A mile out of Debenham, where the lane narrows to one car’s width and the hedges meet overhead, there is a black weatherboarded barn with a hand-painted board that just says CATCHPOLE – LAMBS & WOOL. Most mornings at half past six, Avril Catchpole stands at the gate behind it with a mug of tea, counting heads.

There are 140 of them this autumn. White wool, black faces, black legs – Suffolks and Suffolk crosses, the breed this county gave its name to, and the same kind of sheep she has kept since she and her late husband Gerald bought their first twelve ewes in 1979. If you have ever seen one of her dryer balls, you have already seen them. The little black faces felted onto the wool are not a cartoon. They are her girls.

“People think I made them sweet on purpose,” she says. “I didn’t. I made them look like what was standing in my barn.”

Nine pounds and a bonfire

The dryer balls started, like a lot of things on small farms, with a bill that didn’t add up.

In the spring of 2009 the wool cheque came back a little over nine pounds short of what she had just paid the shearer. “Gerald looked at it and said we’re paying a man to take the wool off so we can lose money on it. Next year it goes on the bonfire.” Plenty of farms round them already did exactly that.

Avril couldn’t bear the idea. That summer she washed the fleeces in her biggest jam pan and rolled the clean wool into tight balls. She knotted them into an old pair of tights and ran them through the washing machine on hot, over and over, until the fibres locked together and the balls bounced off the kitchen floor.

Her granddaughter Megan, six that summer, looked at the plain white ones on the windowsill and asked why they didn’t have faces like the sheep. So Avril took a felting needle and a little black wool from the handful of black ewes she has always kept in the flock, and gave them faces. Two white eyes, a long black nose. Megan named the first three after the ewes in the nearest pen.

The first boxes sold that December at the church Christmas fair in Debenham, then at the Christmas markets in Bury St Edmunds and Norwich, for £45 a box. In seventeen years she and her daughter Tamsin have sent out roughly 30,000 boxes. Not one Catchpole fleece has gone on a bonfire since.

So what do you actually do with them?

Avril has answered this at a thousand market stalls. The answer is almost disappointingly simple: you put three of them in the tumble dryer with a wet load. That’s it. No dryer sheet, no fabric conditioner, no scent boosters. The balls tumble with the washing for the whole cycle and you leave them in the drum for the next load.

What they do in there is mostly mechanical. Wet washing clumps – a fitted sheet swallows half the load, towels roll into a damp knot. The balls keep bouncing between everything and pulling it apart, so the warm air gets into the folds. Wool also holds a little moisture and lets it go again as the drum heats up, which is part of why towels come out loose and fluffy rather than stiff, and why things are less likely to come out crackling with static. From October to March, when nothing dries on the line in Suffolk, that matters more than you’d think.

“My tumble dryer is an old Hotpoint that sounds like a tractor. With a load of towels it used to run the full hour and they still came out like cardboard. Now they’re done sooner and they’re soft. Yours might be different – I only know my own machine.”

The part she cares about more is what she stopped buying.

Plenty of households put a tumble dryer sheet in with every load, or a capful of fabric conditioner in the wash. A family running five or six loads a week goes through close to three hundred sheets a year, and every one ends up in the bin. The sheets and the conditioner both work by leaving a thin softening coating on the fabric, which is why many towel makers recommend leaving them out of towel washes: the coating makes a towel feel soft and dry you less.

“I was buying the big box every month and throwing the whole thing away a sheet at a time,” Avril says. “And my towels smelled like a perfume counter and still didn’t dry my hands. I don’t like paying for something just to throw it away.”

Wool balls don’t get thrown away after a load. If you miss the scent, a couple of drops of essential oil on one ball does the job – she keeps hers plain.

The biscuit tin on the windowsill

On the kitchen windowsill, between a jar of baling twine and a radio permanently tuned to Radio Suffolk, sits an old biscuit tin full of letters from customers. A surprising number come with a photo of the box under a Christmas tree.

Why hers last and the cheap ones don’t

There are dryer balls on every big website now, plenty with animal faces. Many are not felted wool all the way through, but scrap stuffing or a core with wool yarn wound round it and felted on the outside. After a few months of tumbling the yarn loosens, and you are pulling strands of it off your jumpers.

Avril’s are solid. Every ball is felted from the centre out, which is slow, and which is the whole point.

• Wool from her own ewes. Shorn on the farm every spring, washed in her kitchen, never bought in. If it is in the box, it grew on these fields.
• Felted solid, no core. No stuffing, no plastic centre, no yarn wrapped round the outside. Nothing to unravel, nothing to come apart in the drum.
• Faces needled in by hand. The black is wool too, worked into the ball with a barbed felting needle – a few hundred jabs for every face. Not printed, not glued.
• No added fragrance. They smell like clean wool, which is to say almost nothing. Add your own oil if you want a scent.
• Ready to give. Three balls in a window box, about the size of a tennis ball each, with a handwritten card from Tamsin inside.

Why this autumn is the last one

The Catchpoles own the house and 34 acres. The flock has always lived on the other 220 – the long meadows down to the river that Avril and Gerald have rented from the Brockford estate on the same old agreement since the year after they married. The old owner died last winter. In July his son sold the land to a property company that is turning it into holiday lets and a “rewilding” scheme. They were perfectly polite about it. The notice runs out on 31 December.

Thirty-four acres will carry maybe twenty ewes. The rest of the flock goes to market after New Year.

She has looked for other grazing all summer. Land round here goes to solar farms or horse paddocks now, at rents no sheep will ever pay back. And even if something turned up, there would still be her hands. The arthritis started in her right thumb four years ago, and the felting needle is the worst thing she can do to it. She can still do a face. She can’t do three hundred a week any more.

Tamsin, 46, drives the school minibus and does the packing in between runs. Megan is training as a nurse in Ipswich. “Neither of them should take this on,” Avril says. “I wouldn’t want them to.”

What is left is the wool from the last two shearings, already felted: about 3,100 boxes in the spare room and down the hall. A clearance firm from Ipswich offered to take all of it by the kilo. She said no. Instead she dropped the price from £45 to £25 a box and asked Tamsin to keep posting until the hall is empty.

“I’d rather they went into people’s utility rooms than into a warehouse with my name scraped off. Seventeen years of my girls’ wool. I want to know where it went.”

What came back after the first load

Before you order: three things people ask

After 31 December the gate behind the black barn opens onto somebody else’s land. The boxes in the hall keep going out until they’re gone. There won’t be another shearing to make more.

DISCLOSURE: This is a paid advertisement. The owner of this site has a material connection to the products shown on this page. Testimonials reflect individual experiences; results vary with your tumble dryer, load size and fabrics. Images are for illustration; because each ball is felted and faced by hand, the final product may vary slightly. Please review the full returns policy before ordering.