Notes from the Fell: Breed-Specific Yarns

As weavers and spinners, we pick our fiber and yarn carefully for the situation or project at hand. Here is Tom Knisely talking about his interest in also knowing where his fiber comes from. -Susan

The other day, I was thinking about our local farmers market. How lucky we are to be able to choose different varieties of tomatoes. There are cherry and grape tomatoes for salads, plum and San Marzano for sauce, and the big beautiful kinds that fill a slice of bread from crust to crust for that perfect BLT. All have been developed over the years for specific uses.
[PAYWALL] My granddaughter, Imogen, though only five, has the same mindset as her Gumpah. Certain things only have a particular purpose. Imogen has a symbiotic relationship with a chicken named Olive. She feeds and cares for Olive, and her chicken lays a buff-green egg each day for Imogen’s breakfast. This works perfectly for them.

Tom’s granddaughter, Imogen, with her chicken, Olive.

As a spinner, I have picked newly shorn fleeces each spring for their particular qualities and characteristics. Fine fleeces are spun for projects to be used close to the skin. Long-stapled, coarse fleeces are wonderful for rug weaving. I bring many fleeces home just because they’re pretty and look like they would be fun to spin. There are dozens and dozens of breeds of sheep, and all, like tomatoes, have been developed over the years for certain purposes.

While at my local knit shop, Ewe and Me in York, Pennsylvania, I came across some skeins of yarn that were breed specific. The labels read 100% Bluefaced Leicester longwool. It’s rare to see yarns such as this unless they are privately produced by the shepherd who raised the sheep. Small batches from a single breed are carded and millspun to promote and show the beauty of the wool. This was an exciting find, and I came home with skeins of natural and dark brown yarn to weave into a scarf.

Buying directly from the shepherd is one way of sampling breed-specific yarn or roving. Who hasn’t gone a little crazy at a fiber festival? I like going to festivals and talking directly to the farmers and shepherds to find out more about their breeds and why they chose them. Sometimes you get the privilege of meeting the sheep themselves. The internet is another way to find and buy breed-specific yarn, but I like to see it and hold it in my hand.

When you are buying cones and skeins from a big-name company, read the label. It will say 100% wool. These mills have carefully designed a yarn with a particular quality and feel that they like and that is repeatable. The yarns are often blends of wools from several breeds sorted by grade. Wool graders have carefully trained hands that can quickly separate the differences between coarse, medium, and fine wools. Wool grading is more technical than that, though. For the uninformed novice, think about wool being placed in categories that are based on a numerical system that ranges from 1 to 100 with 1 being the coarsest and 100 the finest. It’s easy to think about a fleece that has been deemed to be a grade 54 as a medium-grade wool.

When the spinning mill needs 10,000 pounds of medium-grade wool in a certain range, the wool buyers know exactly what to choose. All the fleeces are washed, carded, spun into yarn, and then dyed as closely as possible to the last batch. The next time you go shopping for yarn, hold the cone in your hand and just imagine that that 8-ounce cone may have as many as 100 sheep contributing to it. Mind-blowing, isn’t it? It’s a lot like that pint of cream in your refrigerator. How many cows contributed to that small pint of cream for your coffee?

Buying breed-specific yarn can be a little like that, too. My skeins of Bluefaced Leicester could be a blend of 20 to 30 sheep depending on the size of the flock, but they’re all from the same breed and the same flock. Just for fun, I called Lydia Piper from Gurdy Run Woolen Mill in Halifax, Pennsylvania. Lydia told me that for her mill to spin yarn from a single sheep, that sheep’s fleece would have to weigh more than 15 pounds in its raw state. She explained that there is a lot of loss in the processing of a fleece. Gurdy Run needs at least 8 pounds of washed and carded wool to run it though the spinning equipment. It makes perfect sense to me now that you would need fleeces from several sheep to get enough to spin into yarn. That phone call changed the way I think about wool yarns for evermore.

I bought those Bluefaced Leicester skeins and wove the scarf that you see here. The mill had spun the skeins as a three-ply fingering-weight yarn. It was clear to me that it was spun to be a knitting yarn, but when I pulled on the yarn, it didn’t have a lot of stretch so I didn’t have a problem weaving with it. I sett the warp at 10 ends per inch and threaded and wove it to a simple broken twill. After weaving, I wet-finished the fabric with a little hair conditioner in the rinse. The scarf, when dried, has such a lovely hand. I will definitely try this wool yarn again.

For now, I am guaranteed that the yarn I purchased is from a single source. Maybe next time I will find a fleece and meet the sheep it came from and spin enough yarn for another scarf. I ask you, how cool would it be to say I know the sheep personally? Like my Imogen and her chicken, I, too, can have a special relationship with the sheep that provided its wool.

If you are interested in learning more about wool and its properties, I recommend the two books listed below in Resources.

Have fun with your search and, as always, happy weaving.

Tom

Resources

• Fournier, Jane and Nola. In Sheep’s Clothing, A Handspinner’s Guide to Wool, Loveland, Colorado: Interweave Press, 1995.
• Larson, Kate. The Practical Spinner’s Guide: Wool. Loveland, Colorado: Interweave, 2015.