Lamb and Wool and Yarn, Oh My

One of my best friends from college, Holly, lives in Anchorage and is an avid (obsessed) knitter.  I imagine that her dreams consist of people made of yarn and everyone has fluffy sheep for pets, like a new version of Claymation called Woolmation.  Anyway, she writes a funny little blog about trying to knit with two kids and often digresses on life in Alaska.

So I made a stop at a yarn store in Bozeman to see if I could find any locally made yarn to send as a little present.  Ordinarily, this would have been a surprise, but of the three Montana yarns, one is located in Bozeman and is all organic.  I immediately called the farm, Thirteen Mile Lamb and Wool Company, to see if we could have a little tour of their operation.  One of the owners, Becky, was kind enough to share an hour of her time and show us around.  I think I should have taken notes, because I no longer remember what any of the machinery was called – I’ll do my best.

The first step is to wash and rinse the wool from the sheep so it’s nice and clean before any fiber or yarn is spun.  They have a 725 gallon tank which is heated by the solar collector on the roof of the barn.  There are several large hot water baths to wash & rinse the raw material.  They only use organic soap so the water can just be dumped in the fields when it needs to be changed.

This machine takes the clean wool and combs it and fluffs it up.

 
Then it is put into this machine which cards? the material into strips of fiber so they can be spun into yarn.  They can also adjust this machine to make batting for quilts.

 
Here’s the real brains of the operation – the spinner.  Unfortunately, they were between batches of yarn, so we couldn’t see it in action.  The fiber is fed into it and the thickness of the yarn can be set by varying the speed of the bottom roller.  You can see the large bobbins – that whole part of the machine moves up and down while it’s running so that the yarn is wound uniformly on the bobbin.  The spinning machine was a prototype by a guy on the east coast who is designing & building these for small scale operations.  The spinner is digitally controlled so they are able to reproduce any yarn lot.

Their property was one of the first homesteads in the area and the log house was built around 1860.  In the background you can see a cordwood sauna that Becky & Dave built.  At one point, they had around 300 sheep in their flock but just recently they had whittled it down to about 100 and just sold them to a neighbor who is continuing to raise them organically.  Becky & Dave will buy the wool and process it into fleece & yarn to sell.  Becky said they had never intended to develop a mill business to quit ranching, that’s just how things worked out.  This gives them more flexibility to travel since they don’t have to take care of livestock everyday.

All of the yarn is dyed with natural dyes (most of which come from fairly exotic places).  Most dyes are made from plant extracts that are purchased from Earthues, but one of the colors was actually made from a bug.  Sadly, I don’t know the details of that one.

Some of the finished materials that are ready to sell.

It was inspiring to find people who are making a living sustainably and proving that small scale manufacturing is a viable alternative to mass production.