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Celebrating Breed-Specific Yarns with Solitude Wool
In northwestern Virginia, in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains, you’ll find the home of Solitude Wool. Since 2006, this woman-owned company has been dedicated to promoting sheep of many breeds and supporting sustainable agriculture.
Gretchen Frederick began selling yarn she handspun from the wool of her flock of Romney sheep at the farmers market in Leesburg, Virginia, in the late 1990s. When the Dupont Circle FreshFarm market in Washington, DC, asked her to become their wool vendor, she was thrilled to accept. But spinning enough yarn to meet the demand wasn’t easy. In 2006, she had to reduce the size of her flock because the land she had been leasing was sold. Her own farm could only support eight sheep—not enough to sustain a yarn business.
Romney lambs on Gretchen’s farm.
That’s when Gretchen teamed up with Sue Bundy, who was raising Karakul sheep on a farm nearby. Together, they envisioned a company that would buy fleece from local farms and work with small mills to create breed-specific yarns. Solitude Wool was born.
Local Focus, Global Impact
Solitude Wool sources fiber exclusively from small farms in the Chesapeake Fibershed. This encompasses all of the Washington, DC, and Baltimore metropolitan area, plus parts of Virginia, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and New York. They work only with breed-specific wool.
Solitude participates in the Livestock Conservancy’s Shave ‘Em to Save ‘Em program, an initiative to preserve rare and endangered sheep breeds. By providing a market for rare-breed wools, Solitude supports and encourages small farmers to continue breeding these sheep, preserving global genetic diversity. You can find yarn and/or roving from Clun Forest, Cotswold, Jacob, Karakul, Leicester Longwool, and Tunis sheep at Solitude Wool, all of which are on the Livestock Conservancy’s Conservation Priority List.
Gretchen Frederick began selling yarn she handspun from the wool of her flock of Romney sheep at the farmers market in Leesburg, Virginia, in the late 1990s. When the Dupont Circle FreshFarm market in Washington, DC, asked her to become their wool vendor, she was thrilled to accept. But spinning enough yarn to meet the demand wasn’t easy. In 2006, she had to reduce the size of her flock because the land she had been leasing was sold. Her own farm could only support eight sheep—not enough to sustain a yarn business.
Romney lambs on Gretchen’s farm.
That’s when Gretchen teamed up with Sue Bundy, who was raising Karakul sheep on a farm nearby. Together, they envisioned a company that would buy fleece from local farms and work with small mills to create breed-specific yarns. Solitude Wool was born.
Local Focus, Global Impact
Solitude Wool sources fiber exclusively from small farms in the Chesapeake Fibershed. This encompasses all of the Washington, DC, and Baltimore metropolitan area, plus parts of Virginia, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and New York. They work only with breed-specific wool.
Solitude participates in the Livestock Conservancy’s Shave ‘Em to Save ‘Em program, an initiative to preserve rare and endangered sheep breeds. By providing a market for rare-breed wools, Solitude supports and encourages small farmers to continue breeding these sheep, preserving global genetic diversity. You can find yarn and/or roving from Clun Forest, Cotswold, Jacob, Karakul, Leicester Longwool, and Tunis sheep at Solitude Wool, all of which are on the Livestock Conservancy’s Conservation Priority List.
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Karakul sheep from Sue Bundy’s RedGate Farm.
Solitude Wool Today
Today, there are a total of seven “Woolies,” five partners and two part-time helpers. In 2018, Debbie Deutsch, Kim Pierce, and Kathy Reed became partners. Since Kathy is a retired Captain in the US Navy, Solitude Wool is now veteran-owned as well as woman-owned.
The “Woolies” Top row (l to r): Gretchen Frederick, Debbie Deutsch, Kim Pierce, Cindy Potter; Bottom Row (l to r): Kathy Reed, Moira Ramsey, Sue Bundy. Photo courtesy of Elysa Darling.
As of this writing, fifteen breeds of sheep, plus alpaca, llama, and cashmere, are listed on the Solitude Wool website. The assortment changes throughout the year as stocks are depleted. Solitude Wool usually works with about 7 farms each year, individually selecting each fleece to source an average of 530 pounds of raw fiber annually. Maintaining a consistent supply of appropriate fleeces can be a challenge.
Left to Right: Debbie, Kathy, and Cindy skirting Montadale fleece.
With continued suburban development throughout the Fibershed, some of their sources have disappeared—flocks have been dispersed, some shepherds have retired, and others have abandoned breed-specific programs in favor of more profitable crossbreeding for meat production. Other farms have grown, and the shepherds now produce their own yarn. However, the number of flocks of Clun Forest, Jacob, and Karakul (all Conservation Priority breeds) has increased, which bodes well for the future of these breeds.
Solitude seeks to highlight the unique qualities of each breed in the yarns and roving they produce. They work with many different mills, enabling them to match each batch of fleece with the mill best equipped to realize its potential. Their Montadale true woolen yarn, for example, is spun at Barlettyarn in Maine on the last mule spinner in the United States. (A video on YouTube shows Solitude’s Montadale yarn on the Bartlettyarns spinning mule.) Gretchen Frederick dyes Solitude’s yarn and fiber using both natural dyes and weak acid dyes.
Border Leicester sport and Tunis 3-ply hanging to dry after dyeing with avocado pits and skins.
Education Is at the Core of the Mission
While several yarn companies are now producing breed-specific yarns, Solitude Wool was a trailblazer. When Gretchen and Sue were selling yarn at farmers markets, literally putting breed-specific yarns into the hands of knitters, most of their customers had never seen a label more specific than “wool.” Clara Parkes’s The Knitter’s Book of Wool, which many credit with raising awareness of different sheep breeds, was published in 2009, three years after Solitude Wool was founded.
As a result, education has always been at the heart of Solitude Wool’s business. In their booth at a fiber festival or farmers’ market, the Woolies are delighted to discuss which breed is best for the project you have in mind, and why. The yarn listings on the Solitude wool website include a photo of the sheep, along with information on the origin of the breed and characteristics of the wool. They’ve created a Yarn Comparison Chart with details about each of their yarns. The label on each skein of yarn tells you which farms grew the fiber and where the farms are located.
Skeins of Clun Forest light dyed with weak acid dyes.
In addition to yarn, Solitude Wool carries roving from the same wide range of sheep breeds. The opportunity to explore a variety of different wools is a gift to the handspinner. And if you need unspun wool for a felting or thrummed knitting project, you need not settle for a generic version.
Solitude Wool’s best-selling yarns are Romney semi-worsted spun, Border Leicester sport weight, and Lama-rama!, a fingering-weight blend of 50% alpaca and 50% Romney wool.
When asked which of their yarns deserve more attention, partner Kim Pierce named three:
• Tunis three-ply, a worsted-weight yarn colored with natural dyes. This woolen-spun three-ply has great stitch definition and is particularly beautiful in cable knitting.
• Tunis double twist, a worsted-weight yarn made by lightly twisting two pencil rovings together to create a yarn that looks like singles. It’s light, lofty, and insulating.
• Romney/Mohair, a fingering-weight woolen-spun single with a lot of twist. The long fibers of Romney blended with 5% mohair make a surprisingly strong yarn for singles.
Kim, Gretchen, and Kathy in the Solitude Wool booth at New York State Sheep & Wool Festival.
Where to Find Solitude Wool
In 2024, Solitude Wool will be setting up their booth at Maryland Sheep & Wool Festival in May, Shenandoah Valley Fiber Festival in September, and New York State Sheep & Wool Festival in October. In addition, you’ll find them during the month of December at the Falls Church Virginia Farmers Market on Saturdays and at Washington, DC’s Dupont Circle FreshFarm Market on Sundays. Of course, their yarns and roving are always available at solitudewool.com.
Sandi Rosner (she/her) learned to knit in the late 1970s from the instructions in the back of a magazine. She now works as a freelance designer, technical editor, writer and teacher. When Sandi isn’t knitting, she usually has her nose in a book. Find more of Sandi’s work at sandirosner.substack.com.
