Vanishing Fleece

by Clara Parkes

  I could see that the first few teeth that the fibers went through were the hardest, strongest ones. They’re the front line for the equipment, Anne explained—the checkpoint that filters out any oddities that may have found their way into the fiber. This can be anything from metal bale clips to hoof trimmings. They’d even found little toys once, probably left behind by children playing near the shearing area. Feathers, too, have a peculiar way of appearing at the most improbable moment.

  The carding machine looked and operated exactly the same as at Bartlett. In the woolen-spinning world (both at Bartlett and here), yarn is really “made” on the cards. The spinning frame just adds a little stretch and twist to finish the deal. That said, the pencil roving coming off the cards will vary in thickness, depending on how thick you want your yarn to be. We were spinning a lighter-weight yarn this time, so the strands of pencil roving coming off the cards were correspondingly finer.

  I should probably stop for a minute and talk about yarn weights. To those who don’t use yarn, it can seem like a pretty standard material. But in actual fact, yarn holds the potential for endless variety, not just in color and texture and fiber content but also in thickness, or weight. A thicker yarn will produce a different-looking stitch than a lightweight one, just as a Magic Marker will draw a different line than a mechanical pencil. Everything we do with yarn is calibrated to its weight.

  I decided not only to split my bale into four batches and have each spun at a different mill, but also to have each spun at a different weight—and to have each weight dictated by what that mill is best at doing. Some mills spin certain weights and fiber types better than others. As Eugene had said, if you don’t know something, you hire people who do, and you learn from them. I’m letting the people operating the mill equipment—Lindsey, Anne, and whomever the final two end up being—decide what’s best and teach me why.

  Lindsey had spun a bulky-weight yarn to showcase the thick, oatmeal-like texture produced by his cards. Here at Blackberry Ridge, Anne’s equipment is set up for shorter, finer fibers. Her cards could produce a finer, smoother strand of roving that could spin into a finer, smoother yarn. After running her tests with the fibers, Anne suggested we stay in the DK range (DK stands for “double knitting” and it refers to a lighter weight of yarn), and so that’s what we did.

  I still want to see what my wool would look like at a lace weight and in a heftier three-ply construction, but I’ll have to wait and see what the next two mills say. For now, I’m loving how my first two yarns share a two-ply construction but are otherwise completely different.

  Anne declared that the spool coming off the carder was full and shut off the motor. Suddenly we could all hear again. I watched Beth tidy up all the pencil roving ends and carefully tuck them into themselves like you’d twist a ponytail into a bun. She then hoisted the spool in her arms as if it weighed nothing and carried it over to the spinning frame, where she dropped it into a waiting cradle above a row of empty spindles.

  Meg tapped me on the shoulder. “I think we’re going to head out.” I’d been so focused on the process that I’d forgotten she was still there. “I’d love to stay, but the girls have reached that point . . .” Her eyes gave a knowing twinkle. Earlier she had told me Cecilia was a budding ballerina. With Anne’s help, we sent them away with a handful of my carded wool to stuff the toes of her pointe shoes. Meg had given her blessing to my bale, and I wanted to pass it on.

  Hugs given at the car, I walked back inside just in time for a lesson on the spinning frame. While the mule spins a much airier and, in my mind, lovelier yarn, it makes yarn only half the time. The other half of the time, the carriage is busy winding the yarn onto the bobbins and making its return journey on the tracks. On a spinning frame, everything flows from top to bottom in one place. No need to pause and wait for the bobbins to wind up what’s just been spun. It works twice as fast, and time is money. Especially in textiles.

  Having placed the spool of roving on top, Beth began separating out each strand of roving and matching it up with the end of each pre-threaded spindle. She just rubbed the two ends together and presto, the magic of wool caused the fibers to adhere.

  The spinning frame is ruled by two functions: draft and speed of twist. Both are controlled by giant, cartoon-like metal gears that can be swapped out, one for another, depending on what you need. Draft pertains to the amount of pull on the roving. The greater the draft, the thinner the roving becomes, but the easier it can break. Speed pertains to the rate at which twist is applied. Fine lace needs more twist than a thick bulky.

  Everything on the machine is driven by gears, so we first made a best estimate of which gears would produce the yarn we wanted. Beth had to don rubber work gloves, as the gears are all covered in a thick layer of grease. Once the gears were set, Anne did a little last-minute oiling before turning on the frame and letting it run for a few minutes. Then we stopped, pulled out a sample of what had just been twisted, let it twist back on itself (mimicking plying), and weighed it on a McMorran Yarn Balance.

  This handy device—once very popular among handspinners, then not offered at all, and now relaunched by someone else as a Yarn Balance—is just a clear plastic box that’s weighted with sand at the bottom and has a little plastic teeter-totter balance up top. It is a remarkably accurate way to tell how many thousands of yards are in each pound of yarn—something mills like to use for guidance. You just cut a sample snippet and place it on a notch at the end of the teeter-totter arm. Then keep cutting and weighing it until it makes the teeter-totter sit perfectly horizontal. Then just measure the length of that snippet and multiply that number by one hundred. We were seeking a snippet that was an even twelve inches, which would represent twelve hundred yards per pound. The first few tries were far too dense and rope-like, so we kept shifting gears—literally—to increase the draft and reduce the twist. Eventually we had a light, airy yarn that balanced perfectly.

  Beth kept scrupulous notes about each change in a spiral-bound notebook. A calculator was brought out. Numbers were thrown around. Both Beth’s and Anne’s scientific backgrounds were quite evident in their mutual passion for precision and their intolerance for fudging anything.

  At last, we were ready to begin the production spinning. Anne turned on the frame and the spool of roving up top began to unwind, the ends running through a small silver “twister” tube that added a little twist but whose real role was simply to help the yarn move forward. The fiber then traveled between two rollers, the space between which is considered the drafting zone, before coming out the bottom, rotating on a flyer, and being wound onto a bobbin.

  Behind it all sat a rotating felt-covered “scavenger” designed to take up the roving if something breaks or gets tangled. This lets all the other spools keep on spinning while the problem gets fixed. Both women kept an eagle eye on the bobbins. With each break, they snapped up the roving and pushed it onto the scavenger to collect while figuring out where the wool had problems. They know their machines so well that they tend to know exactly where the issues are.

  It was fun to watch the two women work together, both being obviously so attuned to the equipment. Out of the blue Beth would say, “Did you hear that, Anne?” And Anne would answer with an “Mmm-hmm,” shift her gaze to a spot on the floor, and then reach down to pick up some tiny piece of plastic I hadn’t seen or heard drop.

  That first day, we wouldn’t get past spinning because of a crucial Blackberry Ridge rule: Always let the yarn rest overnight before plying. (Anne has many rules.) Wool, especially one with high-crimp fibers like my bale, benefits from resting after it’s been twisted. I knew this as a hand spinner, but I doubted that the bigger mills could afford to pay it any attention.

  Another Blackberry Ridge rule: Everything has to be run in forty-pound batches. Years of experience have taught them that forty pounds of fiber sits perfectly on the various-sized spools and bobbins required for each machine. Because there can be slight variances between each batch that
runs through the card, they will never ply strands from the same batch together, either. They’ll always wait until they’ve completed multiple batches and then ply different ones together. It’s another small detail that has the potential to make a big difference.

  Lunchtime at Blackberry Ridge is an intimate affair. Because we were miles from town, Anne set out bread, cheese, cold cuts, and condiments on a folding table in her shop. Beth had made us a flourless chocolate cake for dessert, which we ate with the last of Anne’s blackberries from the previous summer, freshly thawed and full of flavor.

  It was such a distinct pleasure to sit with two smart, skilled women who knew how to make that entire mill go and who were more than happy to share their knowledge with me—without any bravado or awkward gender dynamics getting in the way. I knew that going forward I’d be working in very different mill environments. I savored my three days with them.

  Only after a while did I figure out that Anne is not one for effusive praise. She is her own harshest critic, with incredibly high standards. She worked well with Beth, though. She gave her opinion whenever Beth asked a question, perhaps forceful at first, but when it came to fine tuning, she just stood, arms folded, smiling, looking down, saying, “You decide,” or “It’s up to you.”

  Having given our singles a good overnight rest, we could safely advance to plying the next day. But in order to do that, we first had to move the still-sleeping singles off the spinning-frame bobbins and onto the cones that fit on the twisting station. Every step in the process had its own particular bobbins (or spools, or cones, or spindles, or . . .). For this we used the half-functioning cone winder, whose non-functioning parts still jerked and wobbled in comical ways, like broken robots.

  Then we took the cones to the maze of pegs set up on a frame above the twister.

  Setup was no simple matter. They had to pair a cone from one batch with a cone from another, and then feed the end from each cone through its proper tensioning loop up high and then attach it to the flyer that circulates around the base of the bobbin. That’s not all. Another of Anne’s rules is that the cones all had to be carefully aligned so that both strands were fed into the twister side by side and not one on top of the other. Believe it or not, the position of those strands can affect the balance of your ply. As “dumb” as Anne claimed the machine was, it produced perfect results.

  It took another day to finish twisting the singles into plied yarn. Meanwhile, Anne kept the spinning frame chugging away in the background until the last of our singles had been spun. The plump bobbins of plied yarn were given another overnight nap before they could advance to the reeler for the final step: Winding the yarn into skeins. Calculators and notepads were brought out for more testing, more weighing, and more math. We had to make sure they used the proper number of rotations on the reeler to produce a skein that weighed exactly four ounces. (Like Bartlett, Blackberry Ridge also prefers the Imperial system.) This proved to be the biggest logjam in the entire process. With the reeler capable of winding only ten skeins at a time, it would take Beth days to finish winding my five hundred skeins.

  Another Blackberry Ridge rule: Skeins can never have more than one knot. Because of the capacity of each bobbin and the size of my skeins, this meant a one-in-seven chance of finding a single knot in any of my skeins. Knots are the bane of every knitter’s existence, interrupting the flow of stitches and introducing a vulnerability to the fabric. Inevitably you have to unravel your work to the last row and re-start with the new skein. If your skein has two knots, or three, or four, this quickly becomes a major pain.

  Most bigger mills have replaced knots altogether with a modern contraption called an air splicer, which does a passable job of making you think you have no knots in your yarn but still leaves a lump where one strand was blown open and wrapped around the other. I’d like to say that they’ve introduced this technology to keep their handknitting customers happy, but it all boils down to workload. Tying knots is tedious, and time is money.

  I watched Beth patiently snip and tie every single skein before pulling them off the reeler, tying them together with twine, and depositing them in a large clear plastic bag that had been placed inside a garbage can. For all Anne’s frugality—and she is one of the most frugal people I’ve ever met—these bags are a splurge. Orders will go out in recycled boxes from the grocery store, but each customer gets brand-new bags for their yarn. “It’s 2 mil,” she said. (That’s two-thousandths of an inch; I had to look it up.) “It’s not a wimpy bag.” How like her to know the exact thickness of her plastic bags, which were, in fact, quite substantial.

  Gorgeous as the yarn was, it was still weighed down with spinning oil that gave it a flat, almost cottony feel. Anne wouldn’t even let me take any skeins home with me until she’d brought them into the scouring room, washed them herself, and set them out to dry. I could tell that she was even having trouble letting them go before they’d dried completely. “Be sure to set them out again as soon as you get back to your hotel room,” she said as I was leaving. She would scour the rest of the yarn herself.

  Already, the difference between unwashed and washed skeins was extraordinary. You almost couldn’t tell that they were the same yarn—and you certainly would have no idea that they came from the same fibers as the previous one. What had spun up like oatmeal last time now carried the smooth refinement of jasmine rice.

  Was the difference just because one yarn had been made on a mule and the other on a spinning frame? To a point, yes. But the real difference turned out to be in the setting of the cards themselves. There’s a thing called “clearance,” and it refers to the amount of space between each cylinder. The fine metal teeth on the cylinders should never, ever touch when they pass one another—nor should they be too far apart. It all depends on the average length of fiber you tend to run through the machine. Anne demonstrated hers by taking a fine sheet of metal and sliding it between two of the cylinders. That was her ideal clearance. Other mills will have a different clearance depending on the fibers they run the most often. Asking a mill to adjust its clearance for your order would be tantamount to asking a restaurant to adjust the height of all its kitchen work surfaces to accommodate a visiting chef. (An absurd demand except, say, if that guest had been Julia Child.)

  I was beginning to understand that there is no one-size-fits-all mill for processing wool, no clever set of KitchenAid attachments that let you perfectly spin anything you throw at it. Each mill has equipment that’s calibrated to do one kind of yarn really well. Which means that, among the handful of mills left in this country, depending on what you need to do, your options will be very limited.

  And then there’s scale. If I wanted to launch a sweater company and source everything in the United States, as much as I’d love to work with Anne and her mill, it just wouldn’t be able to scale. My run was a lot. Her ideal order size is just forty pounds, small enough that she can really give it the attention it deserves. Forty pounds of yarn wouldn’t even get you a set of sample sweaters from a knitting company. Would she ever scale higher, to, say, five hundred pounds? She shook her head. “That gets boring.”

  Anne had given me three days of unfettered access to the mill, slowing down every process and explaining its nuance as she went along. The reason she was able to do this is also the reason why she can’t be part of the solution to the bigger wool problem in this country. But she can sure make yarn.

  It was time to advance to the next level of commercial yarn-making. My wool was about to meet the worsted system inside a much, much bigger mill. The kind that could make yarn for that sweater company, and indeed had for many years. But first? I didn’t want my yarn house to have entirely white walls. It was time to pull out a brush, fill up a bucket, and start painting.

  CHAPTER 8

  JOURNEY TO THE HEART OF THE MADDER

  Long before the invention of Kool-Aid or Rit Dye, we had plants. Lots and lots of plants, whose bark, branches, leaves, berries, blossoms, and roots—not to mention
the bugs that feasted on them—provided a rainbow of color when properly coaxed. It’s called natural dyeing, and we still do it today.

  Some learned their skill from modern-day pied pipers such as the late Luisa Gelenter of La Lana Wools in Taos, New Mexico, or the photo-chemist and botanist Michel Garcia. Others come from cultures that have been competently and unselfconsciously carrying on the tradition for millennia, for whom natural dyeing isn’t as much a textbook process as it is an ongoing part of life. Nothing is written down; it is simply known.

  Kristine Vejar met these kinds of people when she traveled to the Great Rann of Kutch, a desert region in the northwest corner of India, to study during college. She returned to India on a Fulbright to learn everything she could from these nomadic people about how their culture intersected with their textile and natural dyeing traditions.

  Once back in the United States, however, the lack of suitable graduate programs in textiles led Kristine down the business path. For several years she worked with a company that made high-end mattresses out of ecologically responsible materials. She learned about the business side of textiles, from sourcing to application to marketing with integrity. She and her partner, Adrienne Rodriguez, settled in Oakland, started saving to buy a house, and figured they had their path figured out.

  Then, on a lark, she took a three-day dyeing workshop with Bay Area fiber artist Claudia Hoberg. It was an aha moment. Suddenly all the things Kristine had observed in India made sense, things that she’d only partially understood in her halting Gujarati or in others’ English as a second language. Soon, another purpose called to that nest egg. What if she used it to start a business instead? She would specialize in naturally dyed yarns.