A Shepherd-Knitter Cross

On a hot July afternoon, my family turned off the highway at a roadside fruit barn as we travelled home from a camping trip on the eastern slopes of the Cascade Mountains. Every road through this fertile region is studded with summer fruit stands, but Prey’s Fruit Barn stood out: Among the painted placards advertising apricots, nectarines, and cherries was a sign that read YARN. And yarn there was—locally grown, dyed in cheerful hues from botanical sources, charmingly displayed in apple baskets. I was powerless. I picked out a couple of Cormo x Romney wool skeins from McFarland Creek Lamb Ranch, a small flock in the Methow Valley.

This is my favorite kind of yarn shopping: chance encounters with fibers you won’t find on a commercial scale. Yarns that speak of the animals that grew them and the work of the shepherd who tended that flock. Yarns with terroir and story. And yarns that represent intentional crossbreeding are especially enticing. [PAYWALL]

Why Crossbreed?

Crossbred wool yarns are different from blends of fiber created during the milling process. Trying to run bouncy, fine, tightly crimped Cormo through mill equipment alongside long, robust, boldly crimped Romney wouldn’t work. You’d have to overspin the Romney to keep the Cormo from falling out, and the yarn would be a ropy mess. But combining the genetics through crossbreeding yields fleeces that meld the parents’ qualities in a (mostly) consistent way. The fleeces may vary among offspring, but they’ll all be millable. Intentional crossbreeding over generations leads to the creation of new breeds such as Corriedale (Merino x Lincoln Longwool), Romeldale (Rambouillet x Romney), and Coopworth (Romney x Border Leicester).

There are hundreds of sheep breeds, each with their unique qualities, and many of them are popular with smaller flocks. Every shepherd strives to balance the needs of their animals, the needs of their land, and the needs of their community. Their sheep must be suited to the local forage and climate—wet or dry, hot or cold—or the animals’ health will suffer. The sheep’s rate of growth, body type, and appeal to other farmers—who may or may not care about fleece quality—must align with the demands of the local market, or the shepherd’s bank account will suffer. Crossing different breeds to build up a set of virtues that don’t exist in any single breed is often the surest way to develop a flock that can thrive in a shepherd’s environmental and economic microclimate.

A flock of Sarah’s purebred and crossbred sheep on an island field.

Where I live, in a scatter of little islands in the Salish Sea, sheep farming has been a way of life since the Hudson’s Bay Company established sheep stations in the mid-1800s. Early flock management was accomplished by boating rams to small outer islands until breeding season. Few of our flocks have ever been purebred, and genetics are largely a matter of “love the one you’re with”: someone buys a purebred ram from the mainland, and he gets traded from farm to farm and island to island.

Crossbreeding for Quality Wool

Many of our island farms stopped caring about wool quality when the world discovered synthetic fibers and the bottom dropped out of the commercial wool market, so breeding decisions are based on “growthiness” of lambs on local grass, maternal ability, and overall health. But a few flocks have cultivated relationships with handspinners, largely through the steady work of Island Fibers on Lopez Island to buy whole clips and take the best fleeces and their textiles to regional fiber shows. These farms have continued to make breeding choices that will result in an appealing fleece and a range of colors for the handspinning market. Spinners will pay handsomely for a clean, well-prepared fleece with the right characteristics, and shepherds who have built a reputation for producing top-quality handspinning wool have also been able to sustain thoughtful breeding programs.

Lee Langstaff of Shepherd’s Hey Farm in Maryland has been mixing breeds in pursuit of a particular fleece quality for decades. Romney, Tasmanian Corriedale, Border Leicester, Romeldale, Wensleydale, and Rambouillet have all seasoned the genetic stew in her flock. Those breeds represent an impressive range of qualities, from Rambouillet’s dense finewool crimp to Wensleydale’s silky, lustrous locks. Over generations of sheep, Lee has coaxed forward the qualities she likes best in the hand of a fleece while also breeding for conformation, parasite resistance, good mothering, and easy temperament. I’m a knitter with limited spinning ability, but an encounter with Lee’s exceptional wool opened my eyes to what crossbreeding can achieve and made me want to try it in my own flock.

Small Mills Mean Small-Batch Yarn

For Lee and many other shepherds of fiber-focused flocks, yarn is what you make from the “good skirtings”—sections of sound wool that are removed because they contain vegetable matter or show different characteristics from the rest of the fleece—or from fleeces that don’t pass muster for presentation to discerning spinners. But a resurgence of small, regional fiber mills is opening up access to processing for small flocks. Rather than storing fleeces for years to accumulate enough wool to meet larger mills’ minimum batch sizes and waiting 12–18 months to get back a box of finished product, shepherds with an interest in creating their own yarn may get a chance to work directly with a local mill to decide what structure and weight will be best for their clip.

Lee sorts her fleeces by color and takes them to Blue Mountain Farm to mill a smooth, shiny, 3-ply DK. There’s a hearty porridge-colored moorit, a soft gray like weathered wood, and a deliciously heathered blend of chocolate brown with glints of lustrous silver that Lee calls “grizzly blend.” They all have the lively depth you can get only from natural sheep colors, the supple sheen of their longwool heritage, and the softness of their finewool genetics. They’re magical yarns you want to tuck in your bag and carry around to squeeze and stroke.

Adding a Little Softness

Inspired by Lee’s results but working within my local fibershed, I began my crossbreeding journey by adding Finnsheep and mixed longwool ewes to my flock. The ewes are half Bluefaced Leicester (BFL). The other half is an island blend known to include Romney, Coopworth, East Friesian, and North Country Cheviot. Beyond that, there’s probably some Dorset, Lincoln, and Columbia. I loved the luster and silkiness of the longwool genetics coupled with the loft of the medium-wool breeds in this mix, but as a knitter, I wanted to make yarn—and I wanted to make yarn that was approachable for knitters beginning to explore beyond the realm of superwash Merino. That meant adding softness.

On the left, a lock from a mixed longwool fleece; on the right, a lock from a Finn fleece; in the middle, a lock from the resulting offspring.

Finewool breeds are the obvious answer but aren’t a great choice for my environment; those sheep are adapted for life on the dry, cold rangelands. Here on the damp side of the mountains, they tend to have foot problems, and their dense fleeces can’t shed water like the longwools or open-fleeced medium breeds can. But Finnsheep—small, friendly beasts adapted to farmstead life in coastal Scandinavia—are happy here and offer a soft, lustrous fleece with medium crimp that comes in a full range of colors. I thought they might provide the softer hand I was hoping for in my dream yarn.

My First Crossbred Yarn

I took my crossbred lambs’ clip to Lydia Christiansen at Abundant Earth Fiber mill on neighboring Whidbey Island, and we worked together to design that yarn. Lydia knows I’m a sweater knitter and agreed that my wool would like to be a 3-ply DK, my favorite weight. We had black and white fleeces, so we spun up subtle marls by adding a little contrast color into one of the plies. We played with the twist to find the right balance of softness and integrity. I knitted miniscule swatches from our test yardage to get a sense of the finished fabric. And a few weeks later, I had boxes of my own distinctive yarn—sheepy, a little bit lustrous, with soft halo from the Finn but structure from the longwool breeds and a hint of puffy bounce, a signature of distant medium wool genetics.

We’ve bred the Finn x BFL/longwool cross four years in a row now, with the yarn evolving to include new color mixes such as a grey heather and a silvery pale brown achieved by blending in some fawn fleeces from the purebred Finns. Each batch that comes back from the mill is subtly and pleasurably distinct—small-flock, small-batch yarns always reflect the individual animals’ experiences and conditions since the previous shearing. Natural colored sheep change hue from year to year, and seasonal changes in feed and weather affect their fleece. The diversity is part of the charm and reward of crossbred wool. Knitting these yarns means stepping into a story—and adding the next chapter yourself.

Sarah Pope stewards a 30-acre sheep farm with her family on San Juan Island, Washington, and occasionally designs knitwear. Her wool company, San Juan Woolworks, buys fleeces from farming neighbors to encourage wool production in the community and produces knitting yarns with the help of two women-owned mills in her fibershed.