Category: Fiber Processing

Hidden Powers of a Sheep

Nice article in the winter issue of Craftsman Quarterly:

https://craftsmanship.net/the-hidden-powers-of-a-sheep/

Judith Schwartz writes about the people who are trying to turn around the near disappearance of American wool processing within the United States.  Ecological reasons for keeping sheep (they contribute to carbon sequestrian if pastures are managed correctly), natural dying,  and efforts to make  American wool products competitive (based on value not on cost) with Chinese products made from American wool.

‘Shop local’ drives sales of American-made yarn

The decline of the American textile industry began after World War II

PUBLISHED ON 

In recent years, however, there’s been a slow-growing demand for wool yarn that’s completely produced in the United States, from sheep to skein, said knitting and wool industries expert Clara Parkes. (Lindsay Wilson, Flickr/Creative Commons)

EAST JORDAN, Mich. — It began when Debbie McDermott allowed her daughter Jamie to raise two sheep for a 4-H project. Eventually, her 165-year-old farm was transformed into a successful, family-run, custom fiber processing mill.

McDermott’s Stonehedge Fiber Mill, which opened in 1999 in East Jordan, Michigan, now produces more than 700 pounds of yarn monthly for customers in 38 states and Canada. It produces an additional 15,000 pounds monthly for its personal lines of yarn, including Shepherd’s Wool, which is milled and dyed in-house before it’s shipped and sold in about 300 shops.

“I really think the appeal is our yarn’s made in the U.S., and people are more and more going toward U.S.-made products as a support for U.S. companies,” McDermott said.

Most garments worn in the United States in the first half of the 20th century were American-made, but the decline of the American textile industry began after World War II, according to knitting and wool industries expert Clara Parkes. She’s a member of the American Sheep Industry — an industry trade group — and author of several books on knitting.

In recent years, however, there’s been a slow-growing demand for wool yarn that’s completely produced in the United States, from sheep to skein, Parkes said.

One reason, she thinks, could be that consumers are turning back to wool because of the environmental risks of microplastics in garments made from synthetics like acrylic, nylon and polyester. The microplastics are released into waterways when the synthetic garments are washed.

Locally sourced yarn helps not only the environment but local businesses too, Parkes said. “There’s the environmental impact of shipping goods all the way across the world and bringing it back, but now people are asking themselves, ‘What if I can get the wool here and just keep it here?’”

McDermott echoed that sentiment: “Shopping local is allowing farmers to raise and keep their animals on the farm.”

Consumer interest in locally sourced yarn inspired the Michigan Fiber Cooperative to produce a line, Fresh Water Fiber, which uses wool and alpaca from Michigan farms. It’s processed by Stonehedge Fiber Mill and dyed by Why Knot Fibers in Traverse City.

One store that stocks Fresh Water Fiber is Wool & Honey in Cedar, Michigan. Owner Melissa Kelenske said she buys from Michigan-based fiber artists and companies that focus on producing high-quality, ethically sourced yarn with attention to their environmental impact.

“I think the farm-to-table movement of eating local, shopping local — basically the major slow food movement — laid the ground work for the knitting industry,” Kelenske said.

Another yarn company that supplies Wool & Honey is Brooklyn Tweed, of Portland, Oregon. Knitwear designer Jared Flood founded the company in 2010 to “preserve, support and sustain” American textile production by doing business with sheep farmers, fiber mills and dyers across the United States.

The business concept “was not so much about patriotism as supporting local economies,” said Christina Rondepierre, Brooklyn Tweed’s marketing manager.

“It was also the revitalization of East Coast mills and dyeing houses and the whole U.S. textile industry so they could sustain income and make sure towns and business were able to stay afoot,” Rondepierre said. For example, the Harrisville, New Hampshire, Historic District mill village spins some of Brooklyn Tweed’s yarns. The village was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1977.

But patriotism, too, is helping to revive the American wool industry.

After Ralph Lauren drew flak for making its Team USA apparel for the 2012 Summer Olympics in China, the fashion company had all Team USA apparel for the 2014 Winter Olympics made in the United States. The yarn used for the closing ceremony sweaters was 4,000 pounds of Shepherd’s Wool from Stonehedge Fiber Mill.

McDermott was shocked when a Ralph Lauren representative asked her to supply the yarn.

“It was a mouth-dropped-open moment when I realized who I was talking to on the phone,” she said. “It was a neat experience.”

–By SHIREEN KORKZAN , Associated Press

Source:  https://www.morningagclips.com/shop-local-drives-sales-of-american-made-yarn/

 

Raw Material Offers One Woman’s View of the American Wool Industry

New book released Oct. 2018….Raw Material – Working Wool in the West

Follow a sweater with an “Italian Merino” label back far enough and chances are its life began not in Milan, but in Montana.

Many people want to look behind the label and know where their clothes come from, but the textile supply chain – one of the most toxic on the planet – remains largely invisible. In Raw Material, Stephany Wilkes tells the story of American wool through her own journey to becoming a certified sheep shearer.

What begins as a search for local yarn becomes a dirty, unlikely and irresistible side job. Wilkes leaves her high-tech job for a way of life considered long dead in the American West. Along the way, she meets ornery sheep that weigh more than she does, carbon-sequestering ranchers, landless grazing operators, rare breed stewards and small-batch yarn makers struggling with drought, unfair trade agreements and faceless bureaucracies as they work to bring eco-friendly fleece to market.

Raw Material demonstrates that the back must break to clothe the body, and that excellence often comes by way of exhaustion.

With humor and humility, Wilkes follows wool from the farm to the factory, through the hands of hardworking Americans trying to change the culture of clothing. Her story will appeal to anyone interested in the fiber arts or the textile industry, and especially to environmentally conscious consumers.

Stehanie’s website:  https://stephanywilkes.com/book

Book also available at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Raw-Material-Working-Wool-West/

 

Women Shearers Featured in Vogue

“I was always acutely aware that there were less women shearers,” photographer Nich Hance McElroy said of photographing women shearers up and down the West Coast for Vogue. But last year, when he began shearing on commercial crews for a shearer and sheep rancher named Robert Irwin, McElroy noticed more and more women working on flocks – many who Irwin actively recruited. Some were already farmers or gardeners themselves, some were tech professionals in the Bay Area with a back-to-the-land mind-set, some were part-time knitters who wondered why it was next to impossible to find local wool. McElroy began photographing them, too.

“I really think, going forward, it’s going to be women doing farm work,” Irwin told me recently by phone from California. “The last five years or so, teaching guys to do this stuff, a lot of them just don’t have the mentality of waking up and thinking to themselves, ‘I’m going to get better at this.’ The women do. They’re more apt to stick with this; they’re more detail-oriented; they’re tougher.”

Read the story at https://www.vogue.com/projects/13535219/women-sheep-shearers-california-oregon-photographs-nich-mcelroy/.