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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 sheep farmer in South Canterbury is letting her last 3,100 boxes go, before her flock goes to the saleyards after New Year

By Anna Mackintosh · Timaru, South Canterbury · 6 November 2026 · A 7-minute read

Twenty minutes inland from Waimate, where the tarseal gives way to gravel and the macrocarpa shelterbelts lean over the road, there is an old corrugated-iron woolshed with a hand-painted sign that just says PETTIGREW – LAMBS & WOOL. Most mornings at half past six, Maxine Pettigrew stands at the gate behind it with a mug of tea, counting heads.

There are 140 of them this spring. White wool, black faces, black legs – Suffolk crosses, in a district where sheep still outnumber people by a long way, and the same kind of sheep she has kept since she and her late husband Ross 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 reckon I made them cute on purpose,” she says. “I didn’t. I made them look like what was standing in my woolshed.”

Nine 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 a little over nine dollars short of what she had just paid the shearers. “Ross looked at it and said we’re paying blokes to take the wool off so we can lose money on it. Next year it goes on the burn pile.” Plenty of places round them already did exactly that.

Maxine couldn’t stand the idea. That spring she washed the fleeces in her biggest stockpot and rolled the clean wool into tight balls. She knotted them into an old pair of stockings and ran them through the washing machine on hot, over and over, until the fibres locked together and the balls bounced off the kitchen lino.

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

The first boxes sold that December at a church Christmas fair in Waimate, then at the Christmas markets in Timaru and Oamaru, for NZ$90 a box. In seventeen years she and her daughter Leanne have sent out roughly 30,000 boxes. Not one Pettigrew fleece has gone on a burn pile since.

So what do you actually do with them?

Maxine has answered this at a thousand market stalls. The answer is almost disappointingly simple: you put three of them in the dryer with a wet load. That’s it. No dryer sheet, no fabric softener, no scent beads. 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. Most of the year her washing goes on the line. The dryer is for wet weeks, winter, and towels that need to be dry by tea time.

“My dryer is an old Fisher & Paykel 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 dryer sheet in with every load, or a capful of fabric softener 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 softener 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 chucking the whole thing out a sheet at a time,” Maxine 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 chucked out after a load. If you miss the scent, a couple of drops of lavender or manuka 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 that only ever gets RNZ National, 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.

Maxine’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 in her own shed every year, washed in her kitchen, never bought in. If it is in the box, it grew in these paddocks.
• 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 Leanne inside.

Why this spring is the last one

The Pettigrews own the house and 14 hectares. The flock has always run on the other 90 – the long paddocks down to the river that Maxine and Ross have leased from the Bruce family on a handshake since the year after they married. Old Mr Bruce died in the summer. In July his kids sold the land to a forestry company that is planting the lot in pines for carbon credits. They were perfectly polite about it. The lease runs out on 31 December.

Fourteen hectares will carry maybe twenty ewes. The rest of the flock goes through the Temuka saleyards after New Year.

She has looked for other country all winter. Land round here goes into pines and carbon plantings 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 anymore.

Leanne, 46, drives the school bus and does the packing in between runs. Ella is studying nursing in Dunedin. “Neither of them should take this on,” Maxine 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 outfit from Christchurch offered to take all of it by the kilo. She said no. Instead she dropped the price from NZ$90 to NZ$54 a box and asked Leanne to keep posting until the hall is empty.

“I’d rather they went into people’s laundries 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 woolshed opens onto somebody else’s paddocks. 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 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.