Hold on to your hats because there's a feel-good story coming up, and you don't even have to be a medium-sized farm animal to appreciate it.

For this is the tale of a woman who felt so passionately about the plight of sheep reared for shows (apparently there are a lot of them around) that she began to rescue them.

And not just rescue them, but use their wool to make knitwear. And not just the kind of sad, lumpy knits that the well-meaning, alas, so often come up with, but really beautiful knits that you might find yourself sorely tempted to buy even if you suspected that they had been wrenched off the back of an unborn lamb. Which, of course, they haven't.

Assuming that sheep can feel happy, Isobel Davies's flock of 600 or so Wensleydale and Shetland sheep must be close to ecstatic, reared as they are on the hillsides of North Yorkshire, overlooking the Swale Valley. The sheep have plenty of space, and are not bred to bear more wool than they are comfortably able live with (unlike some animals in Australia, where merino sheep are reared with wrinkly skin specifically so that they can grow increased amounts of wool, sometimes to the point of exhaustion). They are not subjected to Mulesing, a painful, controversial process in which strips of wool-bearing skin are surgically removed (without anaesthesia) as a way to reduce blowfly strike.

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But this isn't only about humane farming. In its small way, Davies's venture is a riposte to global manufacturing, whereby raw materials from the UK are transported to China for processing and then shipped back to the UK. Davies's fleeces are scoured, washed and combed in Bradford.

They used to be dyed there, too, but Bradford's last dyer recently shut up business, as did the local spinner, so in future the wool will be dyed in the Scottish Borders, while the spinning will be done in a working museum in New Lanark - a location that speaks volumes about the state of traditional skills in this country.

“We're very dysfunctional in this country when it comes to supporting our own industries,” Davies muses. “In France or Italy, you wouldn't catch them letting all their crafts die, but we've let it all go because for years we were told that our economy was a modern one based around financial services.”

Ahem. This is meant to be uplifting, and it is. The proof being in the end product - the Izzy Lane range, Davies's lovely, fashionable (but not fashion-victim) cardigans, coats and skirts, designed by her small (there are two of them) British team, and also in what it says about the power of the individual to make changes.

Davies, who had never heard of vegetarianism until she came to London aged 17 in the 1970s, didn't like what she saw unfolding in the world of rare-breed sheep farming - which, not unlike Crufts, discards animals for any small irregularities in appearance that are perceived as imperfections.

“Show sheep aren't bred for meat, so slaughtering them because of slight pinking of the skin comes down to vanity,” Davies says.

The Izzy Lane sheep aren't bred for consumption, either, which makes their wool a luxury product. One Shetland produces only sufficient fleece - around a kilo, which, once it's cleaned, leaves around 500g - to make one skirt or jumper a year. But Davies, who last week won one of the RSPCA's prestigious Good Business Awards, in the fashion category, feels that the time might just be right for her brand of economics.

“Aren't we all sick of disposability?” she says. “I think people want to be more discerning. We all have wardrobes crammed with stuff. I'm definitely seeing a move away from that. There's nothing more insulating than wool. It's breathable and self-cleaning, and that can never be replicated synthetically. To put on an extra jumper and turn the heating down just makes sense.”

PS: If turning down the heat emphatically doesn't make sense to you, these are still knits worth coveting, regardless of the message.

www.izzylane.com

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