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The Last Shearing · A Farm Profile

“For seventeen years I needled my ewes’ faces onto wool nobody wanted. Now my thumb won’t hold the needle.” — Why a 71-year-old shepherd in Nova Scotia is letting her last 3,100 boxes go, before her flock is sold after New Year’s

By Heather Doucette · Antigonish, Nova Scotia · November 6, 2026 · A 7-minute read

Up the hill from the Antigonish Harbour road, where the pavement turns to gravel and then to two ruts with grass up the middle, there is a red barn with a hand-painted sign that just says MACPHAIL – LAMBS & WOOL. Most mornings at half past six, Iona MacPhail stands at the gate behind it with a coffee mug, counting heads.

There are 140 of them this fall. White wool, black faces, black legs – Suffolk crosses, the same kind of sheep she has kept since she and her late husband Angus 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 cute on purpose,” she says. “I didn’t. I made them look like what was standing in my barn.”

Twelve dollars and a burn pile

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 from the wool co-op a little over twelve dollars short of what she had just paid the shearer. “Angus looked at it and said we’re paying a man to take the wool off so we can lose money on it. Next year we burn it.” Plenty of farms around them already did exactly that.

Iona couldn’t stand the idea. That summer she washed the fleeces in her biggest canning kettle and rolled the clean wool into tight balls. She knotted them into an old pair of pantyhose and ran them through the washer on hot, over and over, until the fibres locked together and the balls bounced off the kitchen floor.

Her granddaughter Kaitlyn, six that summer, looked at the plain white ones on the windowsill and asked why they didn’t have faces like the sheep. So Iona 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. Kaitlyn named the first three after the ewes in the closest pen.

The first boxes sold that December at a church Christmas sale in Antigonish, then at the Christmas craft shows in Truro and Halifax, for CA$72 a box. In seventeen years she and her daughter Krista have sent out roughly 30,000 boxes. Not one MacPhail fleece has gone on a burn pile since.

So what do you actually do with them?

Iona has answered this at a thousand craft tables. The answer is almost disappointingly simple: you put three of them in the dryer with a wet load. That’s it. No sheet, no liquid softener, no scent beads. The balls tumble with the laundry for the whole cycle and you leave them in the drum for the next load.

What they do in there is mostly mechanical. Wet laundry 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.

“My dryer is a 1998 Inglis 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.

Most Canadian households use a dryer sheet in every load. A family running five or six loads a week goes through close to three hundred a year, and every one ends up in the garbage. The sheets also work by leaving a thin softening coating on the fabric, which is why many towel makers recommend leaving them out of towel loads: the coating makes a towel feel soft and dry you less.

“I was buying the big box every month and throwing the whole thing out a sheet at a time,” Iona 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 out.”

Wool balls don’t get thrown out 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 coffee can on the windowsill

On the kitchen windowsill, between a jar of baling twine and a radio that only gets CJFX, sits a coffee can 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 around it and felted on the outside. After a few months of tumbling the yarn loosens, and you are pulling strands of it off your sweaters.

Iona’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 this hill.
• Felted solid, no core. No stuffing, no plastic centre, no yarn wrapped around 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 Krista inside.

Why this fall is the last one

The MacPhails own 34 acres. The flock has always lived on the other 220 – a long, steep hill pasture next door that Iona and Angus have rented from the MacGillivray family on a handshake since the year after they married. Old Mr. MacGillivray died last winter. In July his children sold the land to a buyer from Ontario who is dividing it into cottage lots. The new owner was polite about it. The lease ends December 31.

Thirty-four acres will carry maybe twenty ewes. The rest of the flock goes to the livestock auction in Truro after New Year’s.

She has looked for other pasture all summer. Ground around here gets bought up for cottage lots and Christmas trees now, at prices 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 anymore.

Krista, 46, drives a school bus and runs the packing in between routes. Kaitlyn is in nursing school in Halifax. “Neither of them should take this on,” Iona 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 bedroom and down the hallway. A clearance outfit from Halifax offered to take all of it by the pound. She said no. Instead she dropped the price from CA$72 to CA$43 a box and asked Krista to keep shipping until the hallway is empty.

“I’d rather they went into people’s laundry 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 December 31 the gate behind the red barn opens onto somebody else’s hill. The boxes in the hallway keep shipping 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 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 return policy before ordering.