Tag Archives: yarn

Origin Stories: Upcycled Wool and the Gang

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Origin Stories: Wool and the Gang

BY HANNAH THIESSEN // I truly believe that most people have a passion for the environment. Regardless of how you feel about climate change or the politics of going green, I would wager that most humans around the world have had at least one outdoor experience they found enjoyable. Whether this means long hikes and biking on deserted trails, a car trip through the mountains, a summer camp memory in your childhood or a long day at the beach, people find intrinsic value in beautiful landscapes. We find solace in the reality of ever-present nature around us: We look for homes nestled in greenery, are delighted at the appearance of a rare, bright bird each Spring, and dream of vacations that often feature unknown-to-us plants and locations. If you have ever experienced the loss of a place you’ve loved (perhaps through a tourism boom, construction or natural disaster), you know all too well the importance of preservation: In your own way, your heart has urged you towards making small changes in your own life in order to affect larger changes in the lives of others.

One of the ways that Karen discusses preservation here on the Fringe Association blog is through sustainable garment choices. There are endless ways to apply preservation principles: mending, thrifting, upcycling, hand-making and sharing are just a few. As a knitter, one of my favorite ways to support sustainable garment making is through buying traceable fibers. While I have fallen in love (madly, madly in love) with many beautiful yarns in my decades of knitting, I have recently committed to the idea that if the maker of these yarns will not (or cannot) tell me where they come from, I should not keep buying them. My dollars instead will go to companies willing to be transparent about their supply chain and how their products are impacting the environment — knowledge is power in the hands of knitters.

This doesn’t mean that I knit exclusively with “farm yarns.” While I adore a wonderfully rustic, sheepy wool, I also often find myself craving the sleek and fashionable, comfortable and soft. When a company can combine fashion with transparency, I feel that they’ve hit the “sweet spot.” Such is the case with Wool and the Gang, a fashion knitting company that supports uncomplicated, accessible making, and has made a splash, bringing new knitters into the fold with fun, fast projects and a variety of squishy yarns. Packed in trendy, branded kits and wrapped with recycled paper labels, their goods are the gateway drug of knitting. I cannot count how many kits walk out the door of our local shop in hands that eagerly return, ready to try a new project a few weeks later. While bulky yarns and quick projects have overtones of fast fashion, the reality of Wool and the Gang’s yarn line is based on the idea that by understanding how things are made, we can see more intrinsic value in those made by others.

Jade Harwood, one of the co-founders of Wool in the Gang, is the perfect example of this idea. She learned to knit as many other knitters do, from a relative at a young age. In making miniature outfits for her toys, she embraced her love of making, specifically garment-making, and set herself on the path towards becoming a fashion designer. At 14, inspired by fellow British designers Stella McCartney and Alexander McQueen, she focused her attention on the dream of someday attending Central St. Martins, a London-based college with a world-renowned fashion program. While in attendance years later, she met Aurelie Popper working for a summer at Balmain. (Yes, the Balmain!) After finishing school, they combined efforts with Lisa Sabrier. The three shared a mutual love for building a fashion brand with a soul, a message that could make knitting accessible for a new generation.

The kit concept developed out of breaking down what was hard about learning: super simple introductions, chunky wool and large stitches, paired with online video tutorials. By slowing down and making your basics, they worked to counteract fast fashion by helping people learn new skills. They created a community, the ‘Gang’ part of their name, to support, encourage and connect knitters of all skill levels and ages. They believed that the first step to sustainable fashion was helping people identify with the person behind their garments: in this case, themselves. By pulling back the glossy, magazine layers of fashion, they revealed the truth below — people make things, and it’s possible for all people to make things.

Of course, sustainable goes so far beyond just the act of making. It is about materials. Since day one, the team of Wool and the Gang worked to be conscientious of the environmental issues being caused by mass-produced fashion. While wool is intrinsically considered a sustainable fiber, they wanted to break the mold and introduced yarns that could make even more of an impact on consumer waste.

Heal the Wool expands upon the sustainability of wool by utilizing the leftovers from their existing yarn mill in Peru. 100% recycled wool, it began with the process of gathering six tons of waste fiber that would otherwise have gone into a landfill. Through careful blending and sorting to create colors, they avoided the use of dyes, saving 48,000 liters of water and giving these leftovers a second life. Billie Jean, a denim yarn, is made using upcycled, pre-consumer denim waste — leftovers from denim production in the fashion industry. The waste is ground into fiber and woven into yarn without chemicals or dyes, saving 20,000 liters of water per kilogram of upcycled material. Wool and the Gang will also introduce a new sustainable yarn this summer, using eucalyptus tree fibers.

Origin Stories: Wool and the Gang

One of the toughest questions I ask of any yarn company is about outsourcing. A delicate subject in this industry, outsourcing is often about cost, and comes with a variety of concerning environmental impacts all its own: shipping, exports and questionable mill standards for workers. Often, our views of international fiber production are colored by the horror stories of sweatshop factories and child labor in developing countries. I was worried that this British based company was making a sustainable product, but at the cost of their own domestic wool production (in case you aren’t aware, the UK is having a seriously exciting moment right now with native wools — more on that in a future column!) I was pleasantly surprised by Jade’s answer to my questions about why they’ve chosen to take their production overseas: It is more environmentally sound to have a yarn milled where it is grown.

Peru is the source of the highland wool and alpaca used in Wool and the Gang’s yarns. With ample farming land and a mill partner who is actively involved in the sourcing and invested in the success of Peruvian farmers, it was not a stretch to work within the country to create yarns that embraced the history and tradition of South American wools. Beyond this, the mill they work with can handle the scale of their production, but is also passionate about offering innovative choices, as evidenced by the unique yarns Wool and the Gang is able to commission. That said, Jade and her partners are exploring the possibilities of adding a ‘Brit Wool’ to the pack, and are already dreaming up pun-based names!

In the spirit of this fresh-faced, exciting company, I asked how Wool and the Gang encourages knitters to make a start on the path of sustainable making. Jade suggests recycling yarns that you have, and points towards a recent blog post for the Gang’s top tips on how to help the environment – I am particularly interested in The Uniform Project. 

As for my own thoughts on the subject? I’m going to continue on my mission to share sustainable, accessible, interesting and affordable yarns with you here. In the same way that preserved nature is available to all, I believe that it’s possible to find knit-worthy yarns at all price points and preferences, from the hands of farmers or behind the sleek label of a fashion brand.

Hannah Thiessen is a freelance creative & social media strategist who specializes in yarn and fiber. She knits and dabbles in other crafty pursuits on her blog, www.handmadebyhannahbelle.com, and you can follow her on Instagram as @hannahbelleknits

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Photos © Wool and the Gang; used with permission

Elsewhere

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Elsewhere - yarny links for your clicking pleasure

As I’m writing this, I haven’t yet left for Paris, but hopefully by the time you’re reading it I’ll have had an amazing few days with an amazing weekend ahead of me, before heading home early next week. So I am well and truly Elsewhere, but here are some fabulous links for your clicking pleasure—

– Having spent time experimenting with knitting jute and rope a few years ago, I have a lot of admiration for this (top left)

– I’d seen this short video and lost track of it, and was so happy to run across it again on MDK: Harris Tweed — I’m super intrigued by the few craft and textile traditions that are protected in the same way as “Brie” and “Champagne” and “Whisky/Whiskey”

– I recently had the pleasure of meeting Andrea Hungerford who told me she’d made an indigo kimono inspired by my Idea Log, and boy is it a treasure (bottom right)

– I love the twin stories of the color inspiration for Anna’s Skogafjall (bottom left) and the meaning of Kathy’s motif modifications

– And always love a good yarn tale

– Are you excited about Vickie Howell’s The Knit Show?

– What are your thoughts on slow-fashion advocate Emma Watson’s “sustainable” Beauty and the Beast costumes (top right)

– What’s in your core wardrobe?

– This concept

– These handmade shoes

– These words to live by

– and whoa-my-god this sweater

Have a terrific weekend, everyone! Thanks, always, for being here—

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PREVIOUSLY: Elsewhere

Origin Stories: Starcroft Fiber Mill

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Happy Friday! Today I’m pleased to launch another new regular column, this one by Hannah Thiessen (whose book Slow Knitting is due out this Fall) on the subject of yarns with great origin stories! I hope this will be a great resource for all of us who want to know more about where our materials come from, representing a wide range of sources, fibers and price points. I also want to say a special thank-you to photographer-knitter Gale Zucker (follow @galezucker on Instagram) for providing the shearing-day photos for this piece! For more of Gale’s photos of Nash Island, see her blog.
—Karen

Origin Stories: Starcroft Fiber Mill

BY HANNAH THIESSEN // The first time I encountered Jani Estell’s yarn from the Starcroft Fiber Mill, it felt a lot like being let in on a well-kept secret. I was in New York, attending a fiber show, and some friends of mine mentioned that there would be a yarn-related pop-up show the same day in Greenwich Village. Having never been to Greenwich Village before, and always enticed by the idea of undiscovered yarns, I hailed a cab and headed out for adventure.

The weather was chilly (perfect for those having wooly thoughts), and the rotating art-space venue was just the right amount of cozy, rustic, and full. The glowing warmth of incandescent light and fading sunshine lit up several large farm tables and rustic benches, laden with Starcroft Fiber Mill’s Nash Island wools. Jani Estell wove her way through those purchasing single skeins and sweater lots, while some knitters settled in on skinny, wiggling benches and pulled out their projects to chat. I couldn’t resist the pull of this perfect moment and purchased seven skeins of Nash Island Light, a soft and shiny worsted (almost aran) weight yarn. The color I chose was the palest, faintest collection of cloudy blue: what I dreamt as a reflection of the story of this wool.

The story, really, is simply the best part of this yarn. Yes, the hand is lovely, the colors are beautifully applied, the finished knit has character in abundance — but so many yarns can lay claim to these attributes. It is after the true “yarn” untangles, after I discover the story of a wool, that I truly fall in love.

100 years ago, in 1916, a woman named Jenny Cirone’s father became the lighthouse keeper of a small island off the coast of Downeast Maine. Jenny started a flock of sheep that she tended on Little Nash Island. Over time, her family purchased the land of the small island and its neighboring, larger one, Big Nash Island. When the lighthouse was decommissioned, she moved to the mainland, but continued tending her flock until she was 92 years old. In her will, she entrusted the flock (now wild, with free reign of the island) to her neighbors, the Wakemans, with whom she had a deep friendship (and had taught to lobster-fish!). They continue to care for the flock today in the same way, leaving the sheep free to roam, and rounding them up for shearing. The wool from each shearing was partially sold at wool markets and also combined with a local wool pool, until Jani began working with them around 2005.

Jani Estell started up a small spinning mill just a few miles inland from the Nash Islands in 2000. She began processing fibers for small customers and eventually came into contact with the Wakemans and Jenny (who passed in 2004.) As a local purveyor of yarns, Jani got to know a shearer who worked with the Nash Island flock and was asked along to complete the circle — help out with the shearing. She felt immediate kinship with the Wakemans and with Jenny, whose passion and love for the sheep on her islands was contagious. After working with the sheep, Jenny, and the Wakemans, she fell in love with the story behind the wool and felt a desire to create yarns that could fully celebrate the uniqueness of the island’s fleece. Jani shifted the focus of her mill to producing only her own Starcroft-branded yarns, and providing the Wakeman family with the viable income needed to support the continuation of the Island flock. She is now involved full-time as the wool manager for the flock and purchases all the wool from the islands at fair-market price.

Origin Stories: Starcroft Fiber Mill

After 100 years on the island, the sheep are truly their own landrace breed, with Coopworth and Romney wool introduced through breeding for continued genetic diversity. They produce heavy fleeces with a 6-8″ staple fiber: a medium wool that is surprisingly soft, airy and shiny, with a glowing halo. She sees the wool as akin to a fine wine: Changes in weather and diet for the sheep can yield small changes, giving each shearing a unique vintage. Unlike hay-raised wools or other rustic wools, Nash Island wools are almost completely free of chaff, due to the diet and habitat of the sheep, making them easy to work with and requiring minimal processing. Jani dyes them in a range of “fog-washed” colors, similar to watercolor washes on wet paper.

The sheep are absolutely wild by nature, and do not interact with humans regularly. They have formed a dynamic community and Jani says that they tend to stay together in family groups: Grandmothers, mothers, sisters, daughters and a matriarch ewe might be seen ‘standing vigil’ in lambing season. Their caregivers do their best to minimize contact and observe from a distance. For now, the future of the sheep is clear: It is the desire of Jani and the Wakemans to continue to care for the sheep in just the way that Jenny did. The island is privately owned and cared for with the same level of respect and dedication, and the Wakemans’ three daughters have grown up with the islands and sheep as part of their lives. The eldest Wakeman daughter and her mother have even learned to shear, allowing the mantle to be passed down from Donna Kausen and Geri Valentine, friends of Jenny’s who have been shearing the flock for 35+ years. Shearing is a community effort, with Jani, the Wakemans, and friends from near and far joining to ‘complete the circle’ and bring the wool to the mainland.

Jani has now fully dedicated her time and the mill to solely producing yarns made from the wools of the island flock. Currently, there are three yarns available from Starcroft Fiber Mill: Nash Island Light, a light worsted-weight 2-ply from ewe wool; Nash Island Tide, a DK-weight 2-ply from ewe wool; and Nash Island Fog, a special fingering-weight 2-ply made exclusively from the flock’s lambs’ wool, with an added touch of Maine-grown angora. This Spring, she’ll introduce a new yarn, which I will await with eager anticipation and ready needles. In some small way, by buying the yarn, it’s almost as if I’m getting to complete the larger circle: the story of lives entwined with wool.

Hannah Thiessen is a freelance creative & social media strategist who specializes in yarn and fiber. She knits and dabbles in other crafty pursuits on her blog, www.handmadebyhannahbelle.com, and you can follow her on Instagram as @hannahbelleknits

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Photos of Jani Estell, husband Grant and sheep © Gale Zucker and yarn photo © Holly McBride for Starcroft; used with permission

Green is the new Thistle

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Green is the new Thistle

I’ve apparently not been enthused about Pantone’s Color of the Year since 2014’s pick, “Radiant Orchid” (and my yarn choice, Brooklyn Tweed’s Thistle). And I was puzzled when I heard this year’s Color is Greenery, thinking didn’t we just have Emerald? But apparently that was 2013. 2015 was “Marsala,” and 2016 was a baby pink-and-blue combo I did not love. But if you saw this Instagram post last Spring or that green camisole top I made in August, you’ll guess I’m on board with Greenery. (Even if the flat Pantone swatch brings to mind that color all the packaged food companies use to convey that theirs are the “healthy” cookies.)

So what about yarn? There are millions of green yarns in the world, from neon to murky, and from chartreuse and mint to alpine and olive. But “Greenery,” this grassy, cheery, newly-sprouted-leaf green is not the easiest color to come by in a yarn. The two best options I can find are Quince and Co.’s colorway called Snap Pea, pictured up top on their Chickadee but available on all of their wool yarns, and Green Mountain Spinnery’s Cotton Comfort pictured in the color Leaf. Sincere Sheep also has a semi-solid colorway called Virid that’s available on several bases, and a new color called Katydid launching later this month that might be even closer. And for a tweedy alternative, there’s Arranmore (my current amour) in the color Shamrock. Other suggestions?

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PREVIOUSLY: Yarns in waiting, late 2016

Yarns in Waiting, late 2016

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Yarns in Waiting, late 2016

One thing I didn’t explicitly point out in my little studio tour on Friday was the narrow shelf just above my WIP shelf in the big storage wall, which is where I keep the yarns I’m the most eager to have off the shelf and into my hot little hands. It’s generally a mix of upcoming sweater quantities and some assorted singles or pairs of skeins I’ve either found or been sent. At the moment, that shelf holds four sweater quantities (all discussed here) and a few other beauties I thought I’d show you today — which were actually sitting out on my worktable the day I took most of those photos. With all the same caveats and pleas as in my April Yarns in Waiting post, these are my current fixations/fascinations—

1. The unlabeled ivory skein at the far left is Tov from Woolfolk, which came up in my post about the stunning Tov collection. It’s 16 “cable spun” plies of the same Ultimate Merino of Woolfolk’s original yarns, this time at aran weight. I’ve never seen anything that looks quite like it.

2. We have a joke around my house that my husband’s favorite color is “smudge,” so when I opened the box of Cashmere Merino Bloom (75% extra-fine merino, 25% cashmere) from Purl Soho with this inside, we both knew it was destined to be something for him. This Charcoal Onyx colorway is intriguing — a tonal marl of soft black and dark charcoal. Heathered smudge, you might say.

3. Stone Wool, as I understand it, is a joint effort between Twig & Horn (aka Quince and Co) and Whitney Hayward, who has previously used Stone Wool as the brand for her handspun. This is mill-spun 100% American Cormo, worsted weight, that’s some mysterious combination of worsted- and woollen-spun methodologies. I don’t know if that means 1 ply is worsted spun and the other is woollen spun (?) or what, but I do know it’s delicious in the skein. I’m loving this Tobacco colorway, naturally, which is somewhere between camel and what I think of as tobacco. (The 4-pc pattern collection for this yarn is great, too.)

4. Washington Targhee is Tolt’s new collaboration with Abundant Earth Fiber Mill — a limited edition of 100% Targee fiber grown and milled in the state of Washington. I’m really crazy about this yarn; it’s super tidy looking in the skein and both soft and sturdy to the touch.

5. Those four were all sent to me by the makers in recent months, whereas the last one (of which I have two skeins) I bought at Porter Flea on Friday night from my friend Allison of TN Textile Mill. I was ogling the yardage of her latest fabrics and spotted these skeins on the counter, which are the yarn she’d used for the fabrics I was drooling on at that moment. It’s 100% merino, bulky weight, in a dark camel shade that’s exactly what I’ve been wanting for that turtleneck I’m craving, so I may wind up with a SQ of this one. The fabric it wove up into is incredible but I’m eager to see how the loosely spun yarn knits up and wears. (I’m not sure if she has any plans to list it for sale on her website.) (UPDATE: It’s now available online!)

Given how many of those April yarns in waiting wound up factoring into my queue, I think it’s safe to say you’ll be hearing more from me about these gems!

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PREVIOUSLY: Yarns in waiting

Q for You: What’s the yarn you can’t resist?

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Q for You: What's your yarn-buying weakness?

I have a weakness. A very clearly defined one. No matter how much I get bothered about the quantity of yarn in my house, no matter how many oaths I make about not buying yarn without a clear purpose and intent to cast on, no matter how close I am to throwing my entire stash in a few garbage bags and dropping them off at the center for creative reuse, when I’m faced with a certain type of yarn, I cannot stop myself from buying a sweater’s worth. What type is that, you ask? Small-batch, minimally processed, undyed medium grey yarn. Pictured above are the Sawkill Farm yarn I bought at Rhinebeck in October, Fancy Tiger’s all-Colorado Junegrass from their 10th anniversary celebration (which I didn’t get to go to — but I did get to buy the yarn online!), and Ysolda Teague’s Blend No.1, which I bought after petting it and her utterly perfect Polwarth* sweater in D.C.** They are not the same. The Sawkill is the most unusual blend of breeds; it’s sheepy and airy and farmy. The Junegrass is also farmy and delicious but also squishy and soft. (Sheep soft, not marshmallow soft.) And the Blend No.1 is sport weight, for pete’s sake! They’re as different as night and day.

If you factor in the salt-and-pepper Linen Quill that Purl Soho sent me and the darker grey Hole & Sons I bought from their second (and apparently last) batch, I have five grey sweaters in waiting. And I also genuinely believe I can come up with five sweaters as different from each other as these yarns are, and that there’s no such thing as too many grey sweaters. But clearly if I meet any more small-batch grey yarn in the near future (“but I’ll never have another shot at it!”) I need to remind myself there will always be another one and I have many at home.

So that’s my confession, and also my Q for You: What’s your yarn-buying weakness?

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*Seriously, y’all, that is the perfect sweater. The details are incredible.
**There are no shopping links for the four small-batch yarns discussed here because none of them are available for purchase. See what I mean?!?! I had to!

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PREVIOUSLY in Q for You: Yarn management, collected

Q for You: Softness or durability?

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Q for You: Softness or durability?

This question of softness vs durability in yarns (this false dichotomy, really) is a bit of a motif for me this week. I talked earlier this week about choosing the camel yarn for my upcoming cardigan because it manages to be both incredibly soft and extremely hard-wearing. I’m also working on tomorrow’s post about my finished black Anna Vest, which I knitted in Terra because I wanted it to be black and I happened to have the right amount of black Terra in my stash. Terra is not a yarn I would have considered for my vest, if not for that happenstance. Being a single-ply blend of baby alpaca, merino and silk, it’s what I would categorize as “too soft” for me (and also “too warm” and “too drapey”). I have a prejudice against soft yarns.

There, I said it!

It’s a silly prejudice. While one could make a sweeping generalization that gooey-soft yarns don’t wear well, not all soft yarns are tender or prone to pilling. There are merinos with extremely long staple lengths that don’t pill the way other merinos do. There are blends and hybridizations that balance softness and ruggedness in the same fiber or yarn. There’s how it’s spun, how it’s knitted. And so on. But when it comes to picking out yarns for anything I’m going to spend more than an evening knitting, my number one concern is not how soft it is, but how it will wear. My least favorite thing in the world is to knit something, block it, love it, and have it quickly start looking shabby. Plus, as I’m always saying, I like yarn that feels like it came from an animal, not a lab, and the softer a yarn is, the more it feels fake to me. Which is just me being weird. (And then there’s superwash — natural fiber processed into fakeness.) I like minimally processed yarns, “sticky” yarns, yarns that splice, yarns that smell and feel like sheep. If they’re plenty soft enough to wear but not pillowy, marshmallowy soft, I’m totally fine with that. Not to say I’m not thrilled every time I find a yarn that manages to be both (like the Thirteen Mile recommended in the Anna pattern), but I’ll always prioritize durability over softness. And that may be to my own detriment — Terra wound up being absolutely perfect for the vest, in a completely different way than Thirteen Mile, and I might never have known it.

Here’s the thing — there is no such thing as a straight continuum between cuddliness and ruggedness. It’s just not that simple. It’s more like an XY quadrant chart, with all sorts of factors (breed, ply, milling, etc) playing into where any given yarn would fall in the four quadrants. But I’m proposing we pretend it’s a continuum for the sake of discussion. And that’s my Q for You: Which is most important to you, softness or durability? And what’s your definition of soft?

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PREVIOUSLY in Q for You: What gauge are you?