by Clara Parkes
This was long before Ravelry and Etsy, when just a smattering of hand-dyers existed on any national scale. Thanks to her husband’s business, she hadn’t felt tremendous pressure to have this support the family immediately. “I started small, doing what I could manage,” she told me. “The more routine it got, the more productive I became.”
By the time I arrived with my yarn, Jen had two assistants helping several days a week with yarn preparation, finishing, and packing. She dyes yarn five days a week, about forty weeks a year. She now has more than five hundred repeating colorways, and even more one-of-a-kind colors. “In the thousands, I’m sure.”
When she’s preparing for a big show, she’ll dye eighty skeins a day, flat out, until right before the event. “But that’s usually because I should’ve started dyeing for the show in early July and didn’t start until the end of August.” Her mother occasionally helps, although she’s been relieved of yarn-labeling duties after her particular form of cursive turned the color “Caledonian Pines” into “Caledonian Penis.” (Those labels are now a collector’s item.)
As the buzz has grown about her business, as more people sprint to her booth at shows to snatch up the latest colors, Jen has found herself at a turning point. If this were purely about business, the next logical step would be to hire people to help her dye. That would allow her to take on more wholesale accounts and release more yarn throughout the year.
“But I don’t want to do that,” she said. “People who buy my yarn know who dyed it—that I personally touched the yarn. I think that’s an important part of what I’m selling.” Even if it ultimately limits her growth, she’s fine with that.
Dyeing is what she loves most. She told me the story of her father, an accomplished artist who got a job as a draftsman at an architecture firm. He did so well that he kept getting promoted until he eventually became a partner in the firm—by which time he’d lost all opportunities to draw. She doesn’t want to repeat that mistake.
Jen also benefits from having spent twelve years in commercial real estate. It wasn’t all that fun when she was doing it, but now she can appreciate the business lessons she learned, things like negotiating with vendors and managing staff and cash flow.
She notes that things are easier today than they were early on. “People are no longer scared off by things they’ve never heard of before. They’re more willing to take risks on hand-painted yarn made in small batches by a stranger,” she said. “They’re more educated and accepting of small dyers.”
When asked what advice she would give newcomers, Jen immediately answered, “Don’t quit your day job.”
Social media can make this look like a dream life with huge profits. But the truth is that, even now, she can’t support her whole family on this business. Few do.
“No matter how much you love doing something,” she continued, “there are going to be days when you hate it. But you can’t stay in your pajamas and watch movies and eat bonbons.”
She admitted that she sometimes looks at her friends who stayed in real estate, at their plump 401(k)s and their nannies and their tropical vacations, and she wonders if she made the right choice. But at this point, after more than a decade of total creative freedom, she knows she could never go back to the corporate world again. She chose freedom and flexibility, at whatever cost. “This much I know,” she said. “I could never take direction from anyone else again.” She’d never admit it, but I suspect even my dye commission was a bit of a push.
When the yarn had been fully steamed, Jen turned off the gas and let the skeins cool overnight until they were back to room temperature. She then filled her trusty washing machine with water and a dollop of Synthrapol, a fabric detergent that’s really good at removing excess dye that might cause the colors to bleed later. She gently dropped in the skeins and let them soak for forty-five minutes. (I should note that at no point did she actually set the washing machine on agitate. Her machine will spin a load dry without shooting more water on the fibers, which could cause them to felt.) She spun out the water and rinsed the skeins one more time in warm water to remove the Synthrapol. Finally, she draped the skeins on one of the wooden clothes racks and let them dry overnight.
Bright and early on my last morning, two assistants arrived to help prep the skeins. Wool yarn tends to get shorter when you use heat and moisture to dye it, because the heat and moisture reactivate the fiber’s innate crimp and springiness. Hang an un-dyed skein and a dyed skein side by side and chances are the dyed skein will be visibly shorter.
Jen doesn’t like how blotchy her yarn can look when it comes out of the steamer, so she takes the added step of re-skeining the yarn at a slightly larger circumference so that the colors are more randomly distributed. I know of no large-scale operation that would go to this trouble, but the results were worth it. Now that I could see the finished yarn, I was struck by how much it had transformed.
What had been loose and puffy and delicate was now the texture of crushed velvet. The color was a flickering grayish blue and turquoise, like peacock feathers. I’d seen a lot of yarn, but never anything quite like this. My yarn failure now made me look like a genius.
One by one, Jen’s crew picked up a skein and held it taut between their upright hands as if they were playing cat’s cradle. They’d give it a good shake. And then, in one seamless motion, they’d rotate one wrist a few times, lift the skein up to their chest, tuck their chin down right in the middle of it, bring the ends together, and then lift their chin just as the two sides of the skein twisted back together again, like a perfectly formed pastry. It was a beautiful, well-practiced action that took longer for me to write than it did for them to do. Each skein was carefully stacked inside a plastic bag until all had been twisted. This was only part of the batch. It would be several more days before Jen had completed the whole lot.
So far, this hands-on process worked for Jen. And in general, it serves the craft industry remarkably well. The colors were gorgeous, and her technique had rendered an already unusual yarn even more unique. She has no interest in taking on staff and churning out thousands of skeins every month, so scalability really isn’t a concern. With pricing at current levels, she doesn’t need to scale. While many knitters still balk at paying more than $6 for a pattern, they’re increasingly comfortable spending upwards of $25 for a single skein of hand-dyed yarn if it’s billed as small-batch and in some way artisanal. In fact, the going rate for a rather basic machine-washable Merino yarn base, if dyed by the right person, is now in the mid-$30s.
What works well for individuals is proving fatal for larger yarn companies whose reputations have been built on offering a broad, unvarying selection. For those who want to stay alive and capitalize on this trend, their only option is to partner with a hand-dyer. Finding one who’d be willing to dye their yarns consistently, in the volumes they need, at a rate far lower than retail, and on tight deadline, is nearly impossible.
If we bring this back to my bigger goal of that imaginary American-made sweater business, there’s no way this could ever scale. Besides price, commercial knitting and weaving industries require far more yarn and it must be on cones. I doubt any of them would return an email if you proposed sending them a handful of 100-gram skeins. No matter how pretty the color.
Who could dye my yarn in those quantities? At a price that wouldn’t make my sweaters the exclusive domain of the 1 percent? A commercial dyehouse, that’s who. I had one batch of wool left from my bale, just enough to spin a final yarn befitting of a dyehouse.
First I needed the yarn. And that, my friends, was proving to be a challenge.
CHAPTER 11
SAVED BY THE BALL
My self-imposed Master’s of Yarn-Making program had covered a lot of territory. Thanks to Eugene, I’d attended a shearing and seen the inside of a commercial scouring plant. I’d successfully managed to get my bale fibers onto the last commercially operating spinning mule in the United States. I’d learned how the mule works, and I’d seen how its successor—t
he spinning frame—did somewhat similar work in a far speedier timeframe. I’d observed my little batch of fibers run through capital-b Big mill equipment, the kind that used to supply multiple pages of the L.L.Bean catalog. And I’d witnessed the natural dyeing and synthetic dyeing processes up close with hand-dyeing masters.
But these people and places had generously opened up their worlds to me, sometimes letting me hopscotch in front of bigger, legitimate customers, because they knew me. With the exception of Bollman, which was entirely Eugene’s doing, all of these businesses had deep ties in the handknitting world. They knew my work; they understood the opportunity in this project. They were willing to inconvenience themselves a bit, knowing the cause was good. They had shown me the steps required for a yarn company to manufacture wool yarn in the United States, except for one key factor: I wasn’t a yarn company. I was a familiar face pretending to be a yarn company.
My bale’s last yarn would be the final exam. I needed to approach an even bigger mill with as little handknitting awareness as possible. No upstairs yarn shop, no house line of yarn or sweaters, no beloved Eleanor swatching away and giving feedback. I had already been slowly advancing up the food chain, from mills that spun just a few hundred pounds a week to ones that could produce thousands of pounds a week. This last mill needed to be even bigger, the kind that really could supply my imaginary sweater business and then some. If my fibers were too short for the worsted system, I would go back to woolen for my final experiment.
I knew of a mill in Massachusetts that could do the job. It had no website, no catalog of house yarns to choose from. I only knew about it through my friend Pam Allen, who’d overheard a conversation about it at the mill where her yarn was made. Her mill had fallen behind and subcontracted some of its carding to this other mill. That second place—called S&D Spinning Mill—processes between 1 million and 1.2 million pounds of wool every year. The people at S&D had no idea who I was, and they had no particular interest in taking on my work. Pam would make introductions, but I’d have to seal the deal. The training wheels were officially off.
We began with a nervous, hurried conversation that wasn’t encouraging. They asked me to send fiber samples to be sure they could spin them. I waited weeks until finally mustering the courage to call them back. (I may have mentioned already that I’m extremely phone phobic?) They’d lost my number, they claimed. We had a more friendly and encouraging follow-up conversation this time. Yes, I could visit the mill. They’d be happy to show me around. But they could make no guarantees about when they’d be able to spin my yarn. That was in August.
Since Pam had introduced me to S&D, it seemed only fair to include her in this final mill trip. Pam was a touchstone of the knitting world. She was the original author of Knitting for Dummies, then editor of Interweave Knits magazine, and then creative director at Classic Elite Yarns before launching her own startup, Quince & Co. Since S&D had begun spinning yarn for her as well, she was eager to tag along, and I knew that two brains and two sets of ears would be far better than one.
The drive from Portland, Maine, to Millbury, Massachusetts, is about 140 miles. In good traffic, that’s only two-and-a-half hours. But it’s longer if your passenger assumed you knew the way, and you assumed your passenger knew the way, and you eventually had to pull over and put the address in your respective phones. We were given competing directions at twenty-second intervals all the way from Worcester to Millbury. After passing several abandoned mill buildings along a winding river on the outskirts of town, we found our way to S&D.
In 1753, a man named John Singletary built a mill here. The imposing four-story brick building was positioned at the edge of a man-made pond fed by a small stream fed by a lake. The water from the pond ran under the mill, activating turbines that, in turn, ran the equipment. It was such a source of pride for Millbury that the building was used on the town seal.
By the late 1950s, the mill had been abandoned, the building left empty and in decay. That’s when Frederick Dearnley entered the picture. He’d worked his way up to be superintendent at another mill when the owner suddenly died. The widow who inherited the mill had no real interest in running it, so she and Dearnley worked out a creative financing arrangement. She became a silent partner (she was the “S” to Dearnley’s “D”) in a new company, S&D Spinning Mill. It began in the town of Grafton in 1957 and moved to the Millbury building in 1961. Eventually Dearnley bought out his partner but kept the name.
Frederick’s son had taken over by the 1980s and was running the mill with the help of his five sons: David, John, Jeffrey, Tom, and Scott. Times were good. The spinning order for just one L.L.Bean sweater—the Kingfield—represented about 150,000 pounds of yarn per year.
After NAFTA, things started to dry up. Businesses shifted manufacturing operations to cheaper places like China, India, and Mexico. L.L.Bean moved production of its Kingfield sweater (among others) overseas, and not only did S&D lose the work, but Pine State Knitwear, the South Carolina company that had manufactured those sweaters, soon went out of business.
Between 2000 and 2011, seventeen U.S. manufacturers closed every single day, and the worst hit were in textiles. At the same time our friends at Kraemer were busy selling off property and laying off staff to stay afloat, the brothers at S&D were similarly applying every ounce of New England resourcefulness to survive. But eventually they had to face facts. One left to take a job at AstraZeneca. Another bought a house in Florida and made plans to move, while a third put his house on the market. The American Textile History Museum in Lowell had come and chosen the equipment they’d be able to save. (Ironically, the museum itself would close a few years later.)
In 2007 a miracle happened. After several years of submitting test batches, S&D secured a contract that would bring the mill back to capacity. They would pick, card, and spin the yarn that wraps around the rubber core of every Major League baseball.
Today, operations are divided among two buildings: the original brick mill and a newer cinder-block structure where the twisting, packing, and warehousing take place. Between the two buildings is that stream-fed pond that originally powered the mill turbine. The turbine is also still there, but it’s too far gone to be put back in use. And because the mill was built around the turbine, there’s no way to replace it without dismantling the building. So there it sits.
We were greeted by Jeffrey, the middle brother. He was tall and slender, looked to be in his late fifties, with silver hair, thick glasses, and a sincere smile. He wore a green, short-sleeved work shirt that was tucked into matching green work pants—standard wear for the men at the mill, I’d soon discover. He told us he spends his day running between buildings, doing a bit of everything. His older brother John runs the spinning side of the operations, and John’s son now works at the mill, too. “His daughter worked at the mill for one summer before she came to her senses,” Jeffrey said with a wink.
John was away on vacation that week. He’d set everything up to run in his absence, but they’d just discovered that the fiber they’d been sent for the current baseball run was “having problems.” Their contract stipulates that the blend of fibers in the yarn must be 85 percent wool, with no more than a 3 percent variance. They don’t actually control what fiber they receive from the supplier, and this morning they learned that there was too much wool in the mix. They had to finish carding what they had on the machines and then wait.
While Jeffrey walked us across the yard to the mill building, he began telling us his story. I was immediately struck by an uncanny coincidence. Remember Victor Schmidt at Kraemer? The brother who never wanted to work for the family business and instead got his degree in hotel management, only to be eventually drawn back into the mill? Well, Jeffrey had never aspired to work at the mill, either. He got a degree in hotel restaurant management. He had worked as a purchasing agent for a hotel in western Massachusetts and lived in California briefly.
“I loved it,” he said, “but they didn’t want to pay me anything
.”
Eventually he came back to the mill, just part-time at first to help with the cone-winding, but in the end he was back full-time. Just then, we passed the old time clock in the brick mill building, each employee’s card carefully tucked in its slot.
When they’re ready to run a batch of fiber, Jeffrey explained, they move it across the yard to the mill and hoist it up to the top floor with a rope and pulley system. Many early mills used a gravity system in their manufacturing process, lifting heavy materials to the top floor and then letting gravity carry them from floor to floor through chutes and ducts until finished product emerged at the bottom. Bartlett ran this way, too. Here on the top floor, the bales were opened, their contents spread out and run through a picker. Sometimes the baseball bales were so tightly packed that they had to hack at them with axes to loosen them up.
The floor was still littered with remnants from the recent baseball run. It looked like a stuffed animal factory had exploded: There were tufts and bits of all sorts of unidentifiable material everywhere.
Nearby, a younger man (also in a green work uniform) was replacing a broken leather drive belt.
“Stuff is always breaking around here,” said Jeffrey. “What’s hard is when we have to manufacture the replacement parts.” I thought about my grandma’s Elna sewing machine languishing in the attic because of a broken belt that nobody makes anymore. Even the sewing machine repair guy urged me to take it to the dump, but I couldn’t.
The inside of the mill building revealed its age, with low ceilings and crooked floors, everything having obviously been repaired multiple times, often with duct tape. “We go through a lot of that around here,” Jeffrey confirmed.
On one wobbly wooden pillar hung a clock that played birdsongs every hour, not that you’d be able to hear anything when the equipment was running. A calendar was pinned on an adjacent pillar with a woman in a black bikini and high heels leaning against something I couldn’t quite make out.