by Clara Parkes
Kristine quit her job and leapt in headfirst, renting a roll-up garage space within a business incubator. She soon needed a second space with the incubator, this one for a storefront—and then a third, which she used for a classroom and more yarn production. At this point, she knew it was time to take the leap and move into a larger space that could hold all the branches of her business.
She signed the lease on a retail space she’d had her eye on for some time in Oakland. Its high ceiling and spacious back patio called to her, and it had enough room for classrooms and community events. An architect friend drew up detailed plans and helped her navigate a multitude of building codes. It took three rounds of signing off before the space was approved. Then came the challenge of finding a contractor. At first they wouldn’t talk to Kristine. “They’d just ask, ‘Where’s the man?’” she told me. But Kristine is nothing if not persistent, and on November 10, 2010, A Verb for Keeping Warm opened its doors.
By the time my bale came along, Kristine was up to her eyeballs dyeing yarn for the shop, running the shop, and writing a book of her own. But when I asked if she’d ever consider taking on a commission project such as mine, she said yes. Providence had prevailed yet again.
Whatever mental image your mind may conjure when I say the words “yarn store,” chances are it wouldn’t begin to describe what Kristine and Adrienne have done with A Verb for Keeping Warm. The vaulted wood ceilings and abundant light make it feel more like an aviary for a very special breed of wool-loving bird, complete with one of the most thoughtfully assembled collections of yarn you’ll find anywhere. Tall, open-faced wooden bins are bursting with color that radiates with the brilliance of a Chagall stained-glass window. In the middle of the room, round skirted tables display more skeins sorted by vendor or fiber or color theme. (Kristine carries yarns from other like-spirited companies, not all of whom are committed to natural dyeing.) Glass doors lead to a dye garden in the patio out back. It’s a lot to take in, and most first-timers need a minute to gather their senses. You can only gaze in wonder.
When she first started out, Kristine dyed yarns that she was able to buy wholesale from distributors. But she had recently embarked upon her own yarn journey, sourcing organic Merino wool from Sally Fox, a legend in the naturally colored cotton world who was now raising sheep. The wool was shipped to Green Mountain Spinnery in Vermont for scouring and spinning, and then dyed in Kristine’s Oakland studio. She was a few steps ahead of me on this adventure, and I looked forward to learning from her.
Once Anne and Beth back in Mount Horeb had finished the yarn and shipped it to Oakland, I flew out and we got down to business. The first order of the day was deciding about colors. (But only after racing to my favorite restaurant the previous day to enjoy a plate of tamales and a strawberry agua fresca in the sunshine, as summer—and decent Mexican food—still hadn’t yet reached Maine.) While indigo is by far the most exciting thing to see anyone dye, I wanted this to be Kristine’s decision, so I asked her to choose a color whose process was, for her, the most interesting and rewarding. One that she could easily demonstrate during my visit, and one that she’d be willing to replicate across hundreds of skeins.
She walked me past the baskets of reds and purples and yellows, away from the cochineal, logwood, and weld, and toward a wall of more muted terra-cotta pinks and browns. These had all been dyed with madder, she explained. Kristine is tall and graceful, with the kind of posture that gives regal overtones to everything she says.
I was surprised that so many shades had come from the same material. Some were deep pink, like old-fashioned roses. Others had a touch more orange, moving to the clay roof tile end of the spectrum. And yet others carried the shades of a peach, from dark to light. It all depends on the percentage of dyestuff you use, she explained, and also somewhat on the amount of time you let the yarn sit in the dye. A teaspoon of Hungarian paprika in your chicken recipe will be very different than a tablespoon, and the same principle applies here with color. Not all the yarn bases were 100 percent wool, which added to the nuance. Each fiber absorbs and reflects color differently. Some of her yarns had silk, others were pure wool, while others had a dusting of alpaca.
In response to my questions about madder, Kristine led me out back to the dye garden and pointed to a vigorous patch of green growing in a raised planter. This was madder, she explained. A vigorous grower with sticky leaves, it spreads like crazy via underground rhizomes from which the dye is extracted. Most natural dyes involve a pound-for-pound exchange of materials, meaning for every pound of yarn, we’d need a pound of madder root. I’d sent her a little over sixty pounds of yarn to dye, and that planter itself couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds—and that was with the soil. How, exactly, was this going to work? She smiled and took me back inside. We turned right and ducked through a curtained doorway behind the cash register. We were now in her personal sanctum: the dye studio.
We’d left the yarn aviary behind and were now in an artist’s workspace. Everything—the walls, counters, sink, stove, even parts of the floor—had taken on a patina of splatters, splotches, and drizzles, as if Jackson Pollock’s preferred canvas had been wool. Shelves held assorted sizes and shapes of jars—some plastic, some clear glass. They all had blue painter’s tape with tidy handwriting identifying the contents.
She reached for a jar filled with what looked like cinnamon. Its label said, “Madder.” Lacking acres of her own land across multiple growing regions and a crew of farmers, Kristine relies on dried, powdered dyestuff extract for all of Verb’s production dyeing.
“What’s the madder, you?” I asked, pointing at the jar. “Sorry, you probably get that all the time,” I said.
“Actually, no,” she replied, somewhat surprised herself.
I don’t give puns to total strangers: I’d known Kristine and Adrienne for several years. We’d bonded over having all three graduated from Mills College, a marvelous if somewhat underknown women’s college in Oakland.
Out came the calculator as Kristine carefully weighed several skeins and calculated the average weight. It’s easy to ensure consistent skein yardage, but with wool, getting consistent skein weights is nearly impossible. The material does not want to be controlled to that degree. Kristine figured out how many skeins could fit in one of her large stainless-steel dyepots (seven), and how much madder she would need to dye that collective quantity of yarn. She created a formula, double-checked her numbers, thought about it for a minute, and then nodded. This was good. She spooned powder into a little cup on the scale until it weighed just right. Then she put the powder in a glass measuring cup and dissolved it in hot water. This would go into the dyepot after she’d filled it with warm water.
At this point the dye bath looked a rather unappetizing shade of rusty brown reminiscent of what might come out of a clogged sink. Like glaze on clay, natural dyes require heat to do their thing. It’s one reason why weighing and measuring are so important. You can’t eyeball it, since what you initially see isn’t what you’re going to get. We wanted a little flicker of variegation in these skeins, so Kristine dangled just their ends in the water for a minute or so before completely submerging the rest. A simple trick with lovely results, she assured me.
As the water warmed up and Kristine began nudging the yarn around with a pair of long-handled tongs, a splash of reddish brown appeared at the bottom of the yarn. It looked like someone had spilled Bolognese sauce on half a plate of spaghetti. But as the water continued to heat and Kristine kept gently prodding the yarn, the more color emerged. It would sit here on the stove, vaguely simmering in a bath of 145–150°F (63–65°C) water, for an hour and a half. Multiply this pot of seven skeins by the 250 skeins I’d sent her, and it meant she had another thirty-five dyepots to go. At ninety minutes per pot, that’s more than fifty hours to dye all the yarn. That doesn’t even include the prep work they’d done to get the skeins ready to dye.
After this dyepot had reached the right color saturation, the
pot would be removed from the stove and allowed to cool so as not to disturb the yarn with any temperature changes or agitation (which would lead to felting). Then the contents of the pot would be poured into a plastic bucket (the studio was stacked high with tall white buckets that had been recycled from a neighboring gelato business) and allowed to sit for a day or so.
“This could be an old wives’ tale, but I’ve heard that it helps with fastness,” Kristine said. “The yarn used in the Persian rugs you see in museums, the ones made hundreds of years ago, that still have the red color? Those yarns often sat in madder for a month at a time. In a dry shady spot.”
We’d jumped ahead and started dyeing yarn that had already been prepped earlier in the week. But now, it was time to see how that was done. The process, called “mordanting,” makes it possible for natural dye to fix to fiber in a permanent way. It’s a crucial step that enables that chemical reaction to take place and for dye to attach to wool fibers through what’s called the “ionic process.”
“Well isn’t that ionic!” I exclaimed.
Most natural dyers, including Kristine, use aluminum sulfate for mordant—better known as alum. Adrienne took over this part of the demonstration. She, too, is tall (or maybe I’m just short?) with a straw fedora and the open, cheerful demeanor of a puppy. She brought out her own calculator, produced another notepad, and wrote a new list of numbers in tiny and precise handwriting. We had to figure out how many skeins would fit in each of these larger pots, and how much that amount of yarn would weigh. To that pot we’d add 12 percent of that yarn’s total weight in alum.
“Why not add more?” I asked. “The mordant merrier, am I right?”
More gloves, more water, more spooning onto a scale, more stirring.
These pots sat on large burners in the patio out back, where Adrienne could keep a close eye on them to make sure the water got hot but never simmered. Every twenty minutes, she returned with a wooden stick to give the pot a stir. The yarn itself was in large lingerie bags to prevent tangling. When done, the exhausted mordant would be poured down the drain, its pH having been tested and disposal approved of by the city.
In between stirrings, I took a peek around the rest of the dye garden. While it’s undeniably an urban space, they still manage to make it feel like a refuge. The concrete patio doesn’t have nearly enough space to grow production quantities of anything, but it does offer enough room to grow plants for teaching and demonstration purposes—which they do, in pots and seedling trays tucked on shelves everywhere. Everything is carefully labeled with the name of the plant and the date it was planted.
The garden is more Adrienne’s territory. She has ongoing experiments tucked on shelves, tall mason jars of sinister-looking liquids that looked like biological specimens. Things with mushrooms, walnuts, and eucalyptus bark, things that required weeks, sometimes months—and, in the case of the walnuts, years—to age. She tends to them every day, turning and shaking and rotating and feeding as necessary, always taking copious notes. You could say this is the Verb R&D lab. Production anything can lose its pizazz after a while. Being able to experiment keeps it fun.
“How’d you like to play with real madder?” Kristine asked.
“Ooh, yeah!” Adrienne perked up and ran off to find a hand fork.
She returned and loosened the soil at the base of one of the madder plants. I saw roots right below the surface, like buried electrical wires. She retrieved one vigorous clump and explained that ideally we wanted the root to be the diameter of a pencil, which would give us a better concentration of color. Root chosen, she pulled it loose from the rest, shook off the dirt, and gave it a rinse.
Like fresh turmeric, madder root starts to dye the minute you scrape its surface. Kristine donned rubber gloves and then, with garden pruners, she clipped the roots into little Chiclets-sized nubbins that she slipped into a women’s nylon knee-high stocking. That would serve as a sort of teabag for the dyestuff. (While paper would be a far more eco-friendly solution, Kristine doesn’t like that paper absorbs the dye. Nylon won’t.) There couldn’t have been more than a cup of madder root in there.
“Boy, we’re really getting to the heart of the madder now,” I said. Their laughs told me this might be my last pun of the day.
She tied the stocking with a knot and dropped it into a smaller pot of water along with a skein of undyed yarn. She brought it to a light simmer on another outdoor burner, where it would sit for an hour and a half. Every once in a while she’d lift the lid and nudge the yarn around. Gradually, a bright orange-pink-brown began to settle around, and eventually on, the yarn. It was far brighter than what we’d seen indoors, a more vivid and tropical sort of peach color.
I was still marveling at the madder when Kristine’s foot kicked a gelato bucket and she had another idea. “How about indigo?” she said. “Would you like to play with that?”
In the natural dye world, indigo is the ultimate hat trick. It’s magic. And if anyone offers you a turn at an indigo vat, especially if it’s a perfectly composed one, as I knew Kristine’s would be, you do not even pause before saying yes.
The indigo process requires a book all its own, but in very simple terms it works as follows. Leaves from the indigofera tinctoria plant are harvested and carefully composted before being fermented in water and wood ash. The process takes time and results in a liquid that has been depleted of all oxygen. You know you’ve done it right if a copper-colored scum begins to grow on the surface and the liquid looks green, not blue. Now, all you do is drop yarn (or fabric, or whatever) into the liquid and swirl it around until you’re satisfied. The yarn will look green at this stage. But pull it out of the vat and give it a squeeze. Immediately the liquid begins to oxidize, transforming that green and everything it’s touched—don’t look away or you’ll miss it—into blue.
With so much time and energy and materials required, it’s no wonder that natural dyeing fell out of fashion the minute we figured out a cheaper, faster, and more consistent and stable way to dye with chemicals. But you have to admit, there’s something deeply satisfying about plunking roots and yarn in a vat and ending up with a beautiful color. It has a primal feel to it, like cooking over an open flame, or, come to think of it, knitting your own clothing. You’re looking at the same colors that were in use five thousand years ago.
I willingly sacrificed one of my skeins for the vat. I dunked, swirled, waited, and then slowly pulled out my skein. It was a gorgeous sort of tropical light green you’d expect someone from Tampa to wear. I squeezed out the liquid, dangled it in the air, and—like donning a mood ring and waiting to see what it had to say—I watched in wonder as a delicate sky blue washed across the fibers. It’s a birth and baptism. Fibers that began as one color, then turned another color in the vat, now transform, upon taking their first breaths, into something else entirely.
If I couldn’t take home the madder-dyed skeins, could I at least take this yarn home with me? If I promised to hang it out and let it dry overnight? “No, Clara.” Kristine gave a disapproving shake of the head, and I knew that, after having already exhausted her with puns, I’d tumbled even lower in her esteem. She went on to explain that indigo requires yet more steps to ensure that the color fixes to the fiber. And after that, it’ll still rub off on your fingers or needles or any other surface—a process called “crocking”—while the color molecules work their way into the fiber. It can take months of wear before finally settling down.
So no, I couldn’t indi-go home with my skein. (That was a bonus just for you.) In fact, I wouldn’t see it again for weeks.
Speaking of settling down, I wondered if Kristine and Adrienne had ever managed to replace that nest egg and buy a house. She shook her head. They’re still renting. And the soaring housing costs in the Bay Area were making it increasingly difficult to staff the store. Kristine didn’t say it, but I wondered if those same costs would eventually cast a shadow over their own future in the Bay Area, and that of their colorful oasis. I hoped not
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CHAPTER 9
RUST BELT REVIVAL
It’s a muggy morning in late May. The bale has taken me to Nazareth, Pennsylvania, a sleepy hamlet of 5,600 located two hours and fifty years away from New York City. It once supported three union-backed cement plants and a raceway frequented by local legend Mario Andretti and his family. Its Main Street is a time capsule to lost prosperity. The old hardware store hangs on, as does the Army & Navy Store, the barbershop, and the corner grocer with its illuminated Hershey’s Ice Cream sign and American flag that waves in the breeze. There are a lot of American flags in Nazareth.
The architecture here is an exquisite mix of late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century Revival and late Victorian, with even older stone buildings dating back to before the Moravian Church relinquished civil control of the town in 1858. Proud brick homes have graceful wraparound porches and freshly mowed lawns with generations-old rose bushes. The Nazareth Historic District, starting at Center and Main Streets, was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1988.
Occupying more than three acres along south Main Street is an older mill complex. The paint on the wooden window frames is peeling, and at least one tree is sprouting from between the bricks. In faded paint beneath what was once a water tower for the oldest building is the name Kraemer Textiles. I’m here to meet a family that has been spinning yarn for generations, and to watch my third yarn be spun. Theirs is one of few American textiles manufacturing dynasties still surviving, albeit much diminished and in a castle that’s no longer theirs.
Kraemer Textiles was already a successful hosiery manufacturer when the Schmidt family bought it in 1907. That year’s Davison Blue Book Textile Directory noted that it employed 280 people, offered finishing and dyeing services, and had 113 knitting, 100 ribbing, 45 looping, and 7 sewing machines in operation. Later, when political unrest in the Pacific Rim threatened their silk supply, the family responded by converting the business into a spinning mill. Not too long after that, Kraemer Textiles became one of the first mills in the country to spin synthetic fibers.
