Vanishing Fleece

by Clara Parkes

  Even before I had a chance to wash out the spinning oil and let the fibers relax, the yarn was already thick and spongy and succulent, with an extraordinary degree of loft and bounce that are the telltale signs of mulespun yarn. The neps didn’t seem so much like pills as they did intentional texture, like a thick chenille bathrobe.

  It seems counterintuitive that fibers pulled and drafted and twisted over such a long distance, to which so much freedom has been given, would actually be so airy and even. Yet it is. Mulespun yarn is like a child who has been given a solid foundation—a thorough carding and cohesive rubbing into pencil roving—before being allowed to run free and gather life experience. After the twist has been applied, the yarn is all too happy to wind its way back onto the spindle, telling its family everything it learned that day.

  Modern spinning frames remove that wide expanse of exploration, and the subsequent storytelling, by doing all the drafting and twisting over a very short distance. The yarn is lovely, as we’ll soon see. But it isn’t as special.

  What was supposed to be a little test square got longer and longer until I realized I had the beginnings of a cowl on my hands. The fabric had a plush, sheepy presence that instantly calmed me. It brought me back to shearing day on Eugene’s farm. I’d gone into the pen and was sitting with the waiting ewes. The most outgoing of the bunch—a sweetheart named 126—slowly trotted over and began sniffing me. After she’d deemed my hand safe, she let me reach up and rub her cheek. My fingers inched into the deeper wool along her neck, and I began to scratch. She stopped chewing, her eyelids fluttered, and she leaned into me. We sat quietly like this for a long while before Dominique returned and the spell was broken. Working with this yarn, made from her wool, evoked that very same sense of almost otherworldly connection.

  For the first time since I couldn’t remember how long, I knew I was right where I was supposed to be, doing exactly what I was meant to be doing—and I couldn’t wait to see where the wool took me next.

  CHAPTER 7

  THE STRADIVARIUS OF SALVAGE

  That “next” turned out to be the town of Mount Horeb, Wisconsin, approximately twenty miles west of Madison. There sits a small, unassuming mill that has produced some of the country’s most extraordinary woolen-spun yarn since 1988. It’s that little Michelin-starred restaurant tucked down an obscure country road miles from any big city, but instead of pea velouté and assiette of lamb, it serves yarn.

  You won’t find this mill processing ten-thousand-pound orders for national brands; that’s not its style. Those in the know will nod their heads when you mention Blackberry Ridge Woolen Mill. They’ll inevitably say something good about the owner, Anne Bosch. She knows wool, she knows yarn, she knows her equipment, and she will not allow anything to leave her hands until she deems it perfect. Which she will signal with a reluctant nod and, if you’re lucky, the words, “It’s okay.”

  Part of Anne’s secret is that she has hands-on experience working with the material she creates. She knits. Which is rare for someone who operates a mill. Even more remarkable? She does all her work on salvaged equipment that she manages to play like a Stradivarius. She’s a master. The equipment she uses—a Whitin spinning frame—is the type that eventually rendered the mule obsolete. I wanted to understand the evolution of spinning. I needed someone who was willing to take the time and walk me through it. Anne could do it. I just had to convince her.

  The mill was deep into the dark portion of the light-to-dark color cycle when I wrote. Anne said they’d be shutting everything down and cleaning the cards soon. They only do this twice a year, so my timing was good. But first, she needed a sample of my fibers. She wouldn’t commit until she’d tried them out for herself. If I didn’t mind the cross-contamination with darker fibers, could I send her a sample so that she could quickly run it through the cards?

  I boxed up a few pounds of my wool and shipped them off, fingers crossed. Within days, Anne emailed me a collection of pictures. To the untrained eye, by which I mean mine, they all looked the same. They showed three sheets of white wool presumably coming off the cards, all with little tufts of pills in them. A caption explained that the top one was her “house” wool, the middle one was mine “on gear eighteen,” and the bottom was also mine on gear eighteen but with “weights having been added to the feed box to make the card run lighter.” I had no idea what this all meant, but I loved how serious it had already become, and it made me even more eager to work with Anne. In her previous life, she had been a biochemist and spent the bulk of her career as a study director at a contract laboratory. (“Which is why I try not to eat fast food or take any prescription drugs,” she later told me.) Everything she does with wool has a similar scientific precision to it.

  Anne said she’d love to spin my wool, but with one caveat: The yarn wouldn’t be perfectly even. There would be some neps because the wool was so fine and the fibers were a touch short for her cards. Having just created the yarn equivalent of oatmeal on the spinning mule at Bartlett Yarn, I was not opposed to more neps. I suspected that Anne’s definition of “not perfect” was quite different than mine. Caveat given, she agreed to the project. I gave Claudia at the dyehouse the go-ahead to send Anne our second bale bag of wool, and I bought my plane ticket.

  I’d last been in Madison to speak at the Madison Knitters’ Guild, which is one of the largest in the country. In fact, Wisconsin and Minnesota could vie for the position of the most knitterly state, perhaps because of the high percentage of early immigrants from northern European countries. They brought their exacting and prolific knitting traditions with them. The cold climate also helps.

  Wisconsin has a leg up in this imaginary competition because it was home to the most influential knitting figure of the twentieth century, Elizabeth Zimmermann. She and her husband, Arnold, emigrated from England in 1937, eventually settling in Wisconsin, where they raised a family. Arnold spent the rest of his life working as a brewmaster. Elizabeth went on to design knitwear and then write her influential Newsletter. She became a yarn importer, running both a mail-order company and publishing house. She appeared on public television and hosted an annual “camp” that has become multiple camps, all of which continue today under the deft and loyal leadership of her daughter Meg Swansen and grandson Cully. While everyone likes to call her the Julia Child of knitting, I prefer to think of Julia as the Elizabeth Zimmermann of food.

  Meg still lives in her mother’s schoolhouse in central Wisconsin, but a few times a year she makes the trip down to Madison to see her daughter, Liesl, and granddaughters Renata and Cecilia. The luck of the bale prevailed yet again. I emailed her on a lark, and before I knew it, we had an early-morning date to meet up at a Panera in Madison—with the family in tow—and caravan out to the mill. Liesl’s daughters were old enough to be trusted around mill equipment, though not quite old enough for it to hold their attention for more than an hour. I was overjoyed to have Meg’s company for however long she could stay. It felt like a royal blessing.

  We drove west through farmland that turned to increasingly steep hills and valleys. Our road got narrower until the final turn put us on a dirt road leading up to the house and mill Anne shared with her partner, Marc Robertson. Most of us think of mills as being in old brick buildings along rivers, but once electricity replaced water power, mills could be anywhere you wanted. And in the 1980s, for boutique operations like theirs, it made perfect sense for Anne and Marc to put the mill in their own backyard.

  The mill is just over the hill from where they used to raise a small flock of meat sheep. The flock basically paid for itself, but never more. Even meat sheep have to be shorn, so Anne did what many smaller farmers do: She paid the shearer in fiber, working the trade at about $0.50 per pound. One year, she changed her mind after shearing and asked the shearer if she could buy her wool back. Having already sold it, he put her in touch with the buyer, who happily offered to sell it back to her for $1.50 a pound. Something clicked. If that wool gained so much value in
just those two steps, imagine what it could be worth as yarn?

  They discovered that very few small-scale fiber processors existed, and those who did were extremely busy. It sounded like a solid business plan. Anne and Marc began investigating setting up a mill of their own.

  Anne found a broker named Charlie Haynes. He’d worked in mills all his life and knew everybody. He took her around to see what equipment was available. Interestingly enough, nearly all the other prospective buyers she ran into on these trips were women. This was in the 1980s, when many American mills were upgrading their equipment, consolidating, or simply shutting down. In all three cases, perfectly good equipment was being sold for scrap. A new breed of small-scale custom operators stepped in, buying this equipment and launching mills of their own. This decade brought us Green Mountain Spinnery, Ohio Valley Natural Fibers, Frankenmuth, Yolo Wool Mill (now Valley Oaks), Brown Sheep Company, and Fingerlakes Woolen Mill (since closed)—and in February 1988, Anne and Marc joined their ranks, opening Blackberry Ridge Woolen Mill.

  They began on a shoestring, buying salvaged machinery at junk prices from other mills to install in a building across the driveway from their house. They paid more for shipping than they did for any of the equipment. Bit by bit, the mill came together. They installed a Davis & Furber four-breaker woolen carding system like the one at Bartlett, the first two breakers dating from 1904 and the second two from 1905. Instead of a mule, they chose to go with its successor, a Whitin spinning frame built in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1954. Anne still remembers the day an eighteen-wheeler arrived with a crane to deliver equipment. That same day, her neighbor decided to load up his tractor to move hay from his fields. It was possibly the only day in living history that her little country road had a real traffic jam.

  The spinning frame was originally much longer, but Marc and another advisor, named Emory Benson, spent one spring sawing off the end of the frame and getting it working again. From the section they cut off, they salvaged as many parts as they could, stuffing them in their barn and attic in anticipation of future repairs. Thirty-plus years later, their stockpile of spare parts is running low.

  “I saw one like this for sale a while ago,” Anne said, shaking her head. “They wanted thirty-two thousand dollars.”

  Just out of curiosity, I asked her how much a new spinning frame like this cost.

  “Oh I don’t know,” she said, as if I were asking her how much a solid gold car would cost. “Probably fifty thousand dollars?”

  For all the tech startups that are praised for getting by on a $1.5 million “shoestring,” I was astonished to hear just how low the entry point actually was for a small mill. Even if you added proportional costs for the carding machine, twister, cone winder, and skeiner, you could still get a brand-new mill up and running for less than the average cost of a house in the United States. Why on earth aren’t more people doing this? And where is the venture capital to help them? Are textiles such a dying industry? Or is it simply a matter of perception?

  “You have to be a good mechanic,” Anne explained. Early on she used to take things apart and clean them just to learn how they worked. Now she’s developed more of an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” attitude.

  They were lucky to have Emory’s help in those early years, since none of the equipment came with a manual. He had worked for decades at Portage Woolen Mill (“Ma went there!” chimed Meg), where much of their equipment came from. The next addition was a cone winder, built in 1939, followed by a small reeler (what we’d call a “skein winder”) built by Johnson & Bassett in Worcester, Massachusetts, whose gold-flecked decorative laminate surface dates it to 1960.

  After several years of managing to ply their yarn on the spinning frame—a feat of mechanical wizardry that involved getting the chain and gears to run backward—they finally splurged on an actual twister, also salvaged from Portage after they upgraded. Anne calls it the dumbest machine on the floor. The only thing you can adjust on it is speed. Run it fast for lace; slow it down for bulky. Any time one strand of yarn breaks anywhere along the line, you have to stop the whole machine. But it works.

  Anne and Meg hadn’t seen each other in years, so we stood in the shop at the front of the mill making small talk. Now only open by request, the space was full of Blackberry Ridge yarn that Anne sells online and at festivals. Behind it sat her office, and just off that, the mill. Anne finally gave us a “shall we?” and led us through a little door into the mill. Like a skilled landscape architect, Anne had placed the equipment such that it created its own rooms within the space.

  Once she was sure we were standing out of harm’s way, she started up the card, enormous and completely unprotected and as loud as a freight train. We all stood back in wonder. Wool fibers flowed like water through a complex series of different-sized cylinders. I lost track of Meg, who kept sneaking off to take pictures with the large digital camera she usually reserved for capturing the birds at her feeder or her two stunning cats, Bill and Ted. Liesl and her daughters kept a respectable distance, studying everything politely with their hands behind their backs. Every once in a while Meg would reappear and they’d chuckle about something.

  I came in on the tail end of a story Meg was telling the girls about Oma and Gaffer, their nicknames for Elizabeth and Arnold. Apparently Oma once came home with forty skeins of yarn that had been on closeout at a store, and Gaffer had yelled, “You’ll never use it all!” Of course she showed him, not only using it all but launching a yarn empire of her own.

  Depending on where I looked, there was a feeling of either overcapacity or smallness. Each machine had its quirks—parts that have stopped working or never worked in the first place. Even with a sawed-off end, the spinning frame still dominated the space. Half of the twister and cone winder didn’t work now, the parts having been scavenged to keep the other sides running. Yet the mill is always busy, with a backlog that keeps customers waiting for months at a time.

  If any part of their much-coddled vintage equipment dares break, it can take months to find (or have made) a replacement part. When they had to redo the smooth cylinder at the end of the card (called a “finishing dopper”), the whole thing was out of commission for six months. The companies they rely on for parts change hands or go out of business. The last time they reordered more of the industrial-sized rubber bands that drive the twister tubes, they discovered that the company had been bought and now only makes the bands at a lighter weight that doesn’t have enough strength. Anne asks them to recoat the bands, but . . . “We’ll see when we reorder.”

  The mill is staffed primarily by Anne and her part-time assistant, Beth, who also works as a water-supply specialist for the state of Wisconsin. When not spinning yarn, she administers three parts of the Safe Water Drinking Act. Some days, they’re also joined by Missy, Beth’s gentle beast of an Australian shepherd. While Marc is still somewhat involved in the mill, he’s ready to stop. It’s a problem, Anne said, because she’d like to keep doing this forever.

  “But if we have one thrown back,” she confessed, “that’s it.”

  On that first day, Anne called Marc in to run the picking machine so that she could continue the tour.

  In terms of making yarn, the first few steps weren’t too unlike what I’d seen at Bartlett. Fiber is received. If it’s clean—and Anne really likes it when people deliver clean fiber—it goes straight to the picker. They have no duster. If it needs scouring, Anne does (somewhat reluctantly) offer this service in a back room. Instead of a scouring line like the one at Bollman, Anne has just two large washing machines to do the task, and stacks of mesh shelves for drying the clean fibers. This would not scale. Her scouring costs ten times what Bollman charges and takes weeks instead of hours—but it’s the only option for those who can’t meet the one-thousand-pound minimum at Bollman or Chargeurs. Also, for what it’s worth, her scouring is impeccable.

  While sorting through the wool I’d sent, Anne had already created a discard pile. (I told you sh
e was exacting.) Apparently a few pounds had signs of water damage. The fibers had clumped together and were a slight orange-brown color. “I suppose I could’ve left a bit more in there,” she apologized, “but it’s better to be safe. You don’t want that in your yarn.” This explained the stain I’d seen in the bale, and the slight musty smell I’d noticed while we were packing it up. Please let this be the only wool in my bale that had been damaged.

  Marc came in and donned a big pair of yellow protective earmuffs, started up the picker, and began plopping my wool onto the spiked conveyor belt leading into the machine. The fibers would go through here twice, each time being blown into a little room.

  The picker does such a good job of teasing open the fibers that they at least double in volume between the first and second run. On that second journey through the picker, the fibers are sprayed with a fine mist of high-grade spinning oil to lubricate them and tame any static, as was done at Bartlett.

  “It’s called Heather Lube,” Anne explained. “It used to be called Topps Oil. It’s a good emulsifier, and it washes out.” She told me they don’t use organic or natural oils, such as olive oil, because they tend to go rancid very quickly. Everything is a trade-off.

  When they’d run all the fiber through the picker that second time, Anne opened the door to the little room. It was full of wool. The lower the humidity, the more wool sticks to the walls. The higher the humidity, the more you have on the (scrupulously clean) floor.

  Soon Liesl took her daughters outside. Meg and I helped Anne gather the fibers and carry them over to a big bin (called the “feeder” bin) at the very end of the carding machine. Here another conveyor belt lined with metal teeth—this one running vertically—lifts fiber up and into a weighed bucket. By weighing the fiber before releasing it into the card, they can control the exact amount of fiber being fed into the card at any given time. This matters because what comes off the card is essentially yarn minus the twist. The more uniform the fibers are in thickness, the better. This explained what she’d done with my sample when she’d added weights to the feeder bin. Thinking the load weighed the full amount, when in fact it didn’t, it dropped less fiber and produced a thinner web.