Vanishing Fleece

by Clara Parkes

  Later in the day, Victor informed me that he’d planned a little gathering on my behalf. How’d I like to join him, Eleanor, and two other knitters for dinner? David and Victor rarely socialize outside of work, Eleanor later explained, but she’d insisted Victor invite both Davids, “so that they would have an opportunity to say no.” (Which they did.) And so a few hours later, Eleanor pulled up at my hotel in her much-loved Honda Odyssey, with the odometer reading 228,429 miles, and we made our way to Bethlehem.

  Our first stop was Victor’s condo, located in a renovated steel mill. It had thick brick walls and tall factory windows that faced directly onto a bridge. The traffic was just feet away and going so fast, one wrong turn and a truck would land in his living room. “Sometimes I forget it’s there,” Victor said, pointing to the traffic, “like when I’m getting dressed in the morning.”

  He showed me that framed dollar bill he’d told me about, the one signed by his relative. It was hanging slightly crooked in the entryway among other, also slightly crooked shadow boxes of family mementos. On another wall, this one in his bedroom, he pointed to an elegant framed lithograph of the mill complex during its heyday. It, too, hung slightly askew. I didn’t know Victor well enough to feel comfortable giving the frames a nudge, though it was hard not to.

  Back in the living room, he pointed out a shapely wood-and-steel coffee table made by a local artisan who takes old I-beams from the Bethlehem Steel buildings and incorporates them into furniture. All around were relics of industry past. His pride of place, and connection to it, was abundantly evident. Before dinner, he gave us a driving tour of Bethlehem, slowing so we could admire the handsome old brick buildings and picturesque downtown with a bookstore purporting to be the oldest in the country.

  At the restaurant we were joined by Clara, who works at the mill and dreams of hiking every mile of the Appalachian Trail, and by a friendly woman from New York who loved France “but not the French” and insisted that all vegetables be removed from her plate. The women were clearly used to dining out with Victor, and they bantered back and forth in a familial way.

  I was charmed by how much these women loved knitting. I mean loved it, as in they would happily do it all day, every day, if they could. Their enthusiasm was uplifting. I didn’t have the heart to tell them I spend more time testing and writing about yarn these days than I do knitting anything for fun. I wanted them to believe that their dream really was possible. (And maybe it was?) When Clara asked, “Tell me, what do you do when you aren’t knitting?” I was grateful for the distraction.

  Meanwhile Victor filled us in on what was happening in Bethlehem since the Bethlehem Steel Plant shut down in 2003. It had been turned into an arts and entertainment district with a television studio, a casino, and the ArtsQuest Center. They’d kept the foundry’s five massive blast furnaces and were using them as a backdrop for a performance venue (fittingly called the Levitt Pavilion SteelStacks), of which Victor is a proud board member.

  Over dessert, Victor rolled up his sleeve and showed us a line of stitches.

  “Do you think this is healing right?” he asked.

  They all leaned in and gave it a good study and took turns reassuring him. He turned to me with a smile and whispered, “They’re like my mothers.”

  All at once I could see the little boy who’d charmed the office staff into letting him sharpen all their pencils down to nubbins. And I could see why he came back to the area and to the mill.

  It seemed like a Tennessee Williams play, these two very different brothers held fast by the invisible tendrils of family honor and obligation. If history and globalization had their way, their business would not exist. Yet it does, running smarter and faster on vapors of what it once was, with a skeleton crew and a fraction of the original equipment. It’s the twenty-first-century industrial version of selling the silver, firing the butler, moving into the gardener’s cottage, and doing their best to preserve the heart of their family’s legacy. In other words, adapting.

  Kraemer Textiles’ main work continues to be synthetic blends for industrial applications—things like ropes, rugs, and buffing pads. But the company has found an unexpected niche in the handknitting yarn market, both in the yarn it sells under its own label and the yarns it makes for others. It is also uniquely positioned to spin sufficient quantities of yarn for that mythical American sweater company, should one ever arise.

  Customers look to them to produce yarn they can proudly market with a “Made in America” label. Hand-dyers are seeking domestic mills from which to source their un-dyed materials, and knitters are increasingly compelled to track down domestically produced yarn. It’s become an important business for them. In any given year, nearly half the hand-dyers exhibiting at the national needle arts trade show are Kraemer customers. They’ve found a sweet spot that would’ve made their knitting grandmother very proud. It may not carry the mill, but it’ll definitely help keep the lights on.

  CHAPTER 10

  TREE HOUSE CONFESSIONS

  To walk through the steps a commercial yarn company would take when making yarn in this country, I’d need to reckon with the runaway phenomenon that is hand-dyeing. In the yarn world of late, hand-dyers have taken on a cult status. Head to a festival and you’ll see people lining up, often hours ahead of time, to be among the first at that year’s darling dyer’s booth. They’ll sprint through the fairgrounds like shoppers the morning after Thanksgiving, picking the shelves clean before anyone else has managed to get in.

  You don’t even need to leave your house anymore to partake. You can stay at home in your pajamas, refreshing your browser again and again until the designated hour, minute, and second when a tiny amount of some new special hand-dyed yarn goes up for sale. In one collective gulp, every last skein is swallowed whole in a feeding frenzy that is both mighty and terrifying. The victorious crow their success. The thwarted walk away disheartened, discouraged, and more determined than ever to nail that next release.

  For my Master’s of Yarn-Making curriculum to cover all the bases, it was time to take my yarn to a hand-dyer and watch her (or him, only in this case, her) ply her trade. I wanted to see what kind of person becomes a hand-dyer, and what this person’s daily reality looks like. But there was a problem.

  Most hand-dyers use the same basic yarn: a multiple-ply, worsted-spun, machine-washable Merino, sometimes with a touch of nylon, or silk, or cashmere. Kraemer was well versed in spinning these kinds of yarns for hand-dyers. I even had them add a dusting of silk to my yarn to ensure that the colors would really pop. (I’d also lost so much wool during combing that I risked not having enough yarn to go around. The extra silk was the metaphorical iceberg lettuce to make my burrito bigger.)

  But my wool had ended up being too short and fine to spin into the stereotypical hand-dyer’s yarn. It was looser spun, far more delicate, and with a hint of unpredictability. It hadn’t been run through the chlorine-polymer shrink-resist system at Chargeurs. It was not, by any stretch, machine washable.

  I needed a dyer who had experience working with fibers that weren’t machine washable. Someone who was comfortable with that hint of unpredictability, who could do this in a timely manner and not turn the whole run into one giant felted mess. Someone who was willing to reveal her process to me.

  If you thought Apple was tight-lipped about its development process, try approaching a hand-dyer about her process. In a market where everyone’s using the same handful of yarn bases from an even smaller handful of mills, and dyeing them often with the very same dyes, nothing distinguishes one from another except for individual color aesthetic and process.

  I immediately thought of my friend Jennifer Heverly, the same Jennifer who’d played Thelma to my Louise in Texas. Early in the life of her business, Spirit Trail Fiberworks, she’d obtained rare and unusual wools, made yarn from them, and hand-dyed it. She could deal with the unpredictable. She also knew how to coax emotion and nuance out of silk blends, which had increasingly become her preferred
base. She was also the very best kind of perfectionist, with organizational skills that made me look like a squirrel. I knew she’d do a good job in a timely manner. And because we were friends, I might even be able to convince her to pull back that curtain a tiny bit and reveal some of her process to me.

  Jen’s story parallels that of many hand-dyers who turned to a creative field after bottoming out in corporate America. She’d spent more than a decade at a high-powered job managing commercial real estate in Washington, D.C. At one point she’d had twenty people reporting to her. She was on the fast track, but she was losing her life in the process.

  She and her husband, Brett, moved to the country and built their dream home on land her parents had bought in Rappahannock County, Virginia, where she’d spent her summers as a child. While it’s distinctly rural, its proximity to Washington, D.C. (just ninety minutes in good traffic), has made it a weekend hamlet for the Beltway crowd. She’s just down the road from the Michelin three-starred Inn at Little Washington.

  Jen’s architect father designed the house, and they built it using almost exclusively wood harvested from the lot. Nearly every piece of wood is local, from the exterior to the stairs, floors, bookshelves, kitchen cabinets, and even the countertops. So, too, were the woodshed and nearby tree house for the kids.

  Signs of Jen’s creativity are everywhere in her house. She and her family made the stove backsplash tiles themselves, covering them with handprints and abstract doodles and scratchings. A stained-glass window (also made by Jen) illuminates the high peak above the front door. On the walls, her framed paintings and drawings sit among mounted deer heads from Brett’s hunting expeditions. “I drew the line at four,” she said. “I told him if he wanted any more, he’d have to build a man cave.”

  A windowed stairwell dominates a large open space that combines the living room, dining area, and kitchen. Two bare, angular tree trunks run up the center of the stairwell from basement to attic, giving one the feeling of being in a tree house.

  Jen runs her dye empire from a computer at the kitchen counter where she can preside over the goings-on of her two teenagers, Jackson and Caragh, and whichever friends might be visiting at the time. Kids are always coming over. “I’m the cool mom,” she likes to say.

  Her actual dye studio is downstairs, with sliding glass doors looking out onto a covered patio where the dyepots reside. That’s a somewhat Photoshopped story. The truth is that this popular hand-dyer did all her work, thousands of skeins a year, out of a walk-in laundry closet off her family room. The sliding glass doors lead to that covered patio, pots, and burners.

  “People keep writing and asking if they can come visit my studio, as if I actually have one,” she said. “I can’t show them this.” She pointed to the large cardboard boxes stacked in corners around the TV, couches, and treadmill. She had even more stored in the trailer she takes with her to shows. Another corner had several wooden drying racks laden with freshly dyed yarn from the day before, a fan blowing to circulate the air. “The yarn does make a good humidifier in the winter,” she admitted.

  For years, a studio was an ongoing bone of contention in her household. Her father had drawn up plans for something so much smaller than what she’d specified, it sparked years of debate about the value of her work and its legitimate need for a proper space versus what other people thought she needed. After my visit, she would finally move her operations out of the house and into a spacious, formal studio. But for more than a decade, this was it. A domestic situation mirrored by many other extremely popular and prolific hand-dyers.

  Like the majority of her peers, Jen uses synthetic dyes. They operate on a much simpler, less idiosyncratic basis than natural dyeing. Mix powdered dye with water, splash it on your yarn, give it a cook, and you’re done. I oversimplify, but not by much.

  But even using this easier route, the yarn has to be prepared first. Instead of calling it a mordant, Jen uses the term “acid assist.” This makes the fiber more receptive to dye; it can be something as simple as vinegar. Jen prefers a one-to-one ratio of citric acid and vinegar, but don’t tell anyone.

  Today we’d be dyeing three batches of the bale yarn spun by Kraemer. Each would contain two bundles of five skeins—so thirty skeins. She’d already given the yarns an acid assist. She’d also dyed me three possible colors (on her own yarn) to choose from. We didn’t lose any skeins to trial and error, which was good because I had no skeins to spare. She knew the dye recipe and could repeat it consistently.

  I’d asked Kraemer to skein the yarn and ship it directly to Jen, which they did. The cardboard box had self-destructed in transit, arriving partially taped back together and with several skeins sticking out, their frayed fibers covered with a greasy black smudge.

  This was my first time studying the yarn up close, and my heart sank immediately. I knew it would be dramatically different from the first two yarns. But it was nothing like the springy, tightly spun yarns that hand-dyers use, which had been my entire goal. Instead, it had two very loosely spun, loosely plied strands that looked like they’d fall apart at any minute.

  My mind flashed back to the last day of my Kraemer visit. It had been unbelievably hot in the mill. I’d been sweating in places I didn’t even know I could sweat. I’d rejected their first sample as far too loose. I’d watched Dave don the giant rubber gloves and tinker with the greasy gears at the end of the spinning frame.

  When he brought me the second sample, it still wasn’t perfect. But it was better. I was starting to feel guilty about taking up so much of their time for so tiny a project. I was also worrying about how much wool I had left, and how much wool each test had used up. I talked myself into believing the yarn would be fine, and I told him to proceed. Any disappointment in this yarn was entirely my fault.

  Jen had been wary of me photographing and documenting too much of her process because it was, to her, what made her work unique. As soon as I saw her process, I understood why.

  A little background first. Most hand-dyers will do some form of immersion dye, where you plunk a skein into a pot of dye and let it work its magic. Or you plunk part of the skein into one pot, and then plunk the other side into another pot. Or you drizzle another color in halfway. Something. It always involves a big pot filled with dye.

  But Jen used no giant dyepot whatsoever. Instead, she spread out the skeins to be dyed on a table covered with plastic. She added varying quantities of five different dyes into three huge canning jars, topped them off with water, and then donned a pair of yellow kitchen gloves as if she were getting ready to scrub the tub.

  She picked up the first jar and sloshed some dye onto the recumbent skeins. She set down the jar and began to massage the dye into the yarn. Not a light tap, either, but with a pressure and ferocity of a masseuse at a Turkish bath. It looked like she was squeezing, but she said no, she was using her upper body to push the dye into the yarn.

  As soon as she was satisfied with one area of yarn, she’d pick up the jar and slosh dye elsewhere. Then came more pushing, pushing, and pushing, this time as if she were wrestling dough into submission. I could see a faint glisten of sweat build on her forehead and upper lip. This was intensely physical work.

  On a busy day, Jen dyes forty to fifty skeins, which is a lot of pushing. A few years ago she began having back problems that almost put her out of commission. After realizing that her dye table might be at fault and putting it on riser blocks, the pain went away.

  It was hard to believe that the yarn could absorb those three jars of color, but it did. When she was done giving them their spa treatment, she lifted the skeins. Not a single drop of dye remained on the table.

  Satisfied with her work, Jen gave the yarn a light spritz with another acid assist, rolled up each five-skein bundle in plastic, and took the bundles outside to one of the waiting pots. They’d been used so much over the years, they’d developed a patina of copper and gunmetal gray.

  She’d already put water in the pot and lit the burner so
that everything would be hot the minute those skeins hit the steamer tray. In variegated yarn, you want the dye to hit, or “strike,” the fibers instantly, which happens with heat. If you don’t, the colors will migrate as the water heats up. And, as we know, Jen doesn’t like it when colors have a mind of their own. She closed the lid and left them to steam for about ninety minutes to make sure the heat hit the very centers of the skeins. They never touched boiling water. It was the steam heat that set the color.

  While we waited, we got to talking. I asked Jen how she came to this technique, which was so different from anything I’d seen before.

  “Oh, easy,” she said with a laugh. “I’m a control freak.”

  With immersion dyeing, you can’t control where, exactly, the color goes on the skein. You just drop the whole thing into the pot, kerplunk, end of story. Jen prefers to physically apply color to each inch of yarn, directing each splosh and press until she likes what she sees. Sure, during steaming the colors can still move around a bit until they settle on receptive fiber. That’s how her skeins can look identical going in and still come out with variegation. But she still has far more control over the finished product. And control is something she likes.

  Jen began her business in the early 2000s. She’d given up a stressful office job to stay home, take care of the kids, and help with the back-office part of her husband’s landscaping business. But that wasn’t enough. She grew passionate about rare sheep breeds and about dyeing yarn, and soon realized she could easily start a business at home. It would give her the freedom to take care of the household while also doing something creatively fulfilling for herself.