It was not so long ago. Iree Bowling remembers when women in her family made woolen clothes from yarn they spun from wool shorn from their sheep.
"My great-grandmother, she wove her own blankets with sheep wool. She had a weaving mill, and she made the thread, wool thread. She knitted socks and gloves and sweaters and things like that for the family. Then Grandma, she owned sheep and she done the same thing, always made her own bedcovers. And then Mommy, you know, she started quilting, and so it went on and on."