Vanishing Fleece by Clara Parkes
Clara Parkes . Unknown Year . English
Vanishing Fleece is a fast-paced account of the year New York Times bestselling author Clara Parkes spent transforming a 676-pound bale of fleece into saleable yarn, and the people and vanishing industry she discovered along the way. Join Clara Parkes on a cross-country adventure and meet a cast of characters that includes the shepherds, dyers, and countless workers without whom our knitting needles would be empty, our mills idle, and our feet woefully cold. Travel the country with her as she meets a flock of Saxon Merino sheep in upstate New York, tours a scouring plant in Texas, visits a steamy Maine dyehouse, helps sort freshly shorn wool on a working farm, and learns how wool fleece is measured, baled, shipped, and turned into skeins. In pursuit of the perfect yarn, Parkes describes a brush with the dangers of opening a bale (they can explode), and her adventures from Maine to Wisconsin (“the most knitterly state”) and back again; along the way, she presents a behind-the-scenes look at the spinners, scourers, genius inventors, and crazy-complex mill machines that populate the yarn-making industry. By the end of the book, you’ll be ready to set aside the backyard chickens and add a flock of sheep instead. Simply put, no other book exists that explores American culture through the lens of wool. “While I laughed and loved Clara’s prose, I was left with so much more. It’s actually a lovely and melancholy look at an American industry that’s quickly changing, and a beautiful story of the people who are sacrificing to maintain it.” —Judy Greer, actor, director, and author of I Don’t Know What You Know Me From: Confessions of a Co-Star
Categories: Travel
About the Author
“Long before social media cluttered every corner of our existence, Parkes’s conversational 411 about new yarns and interesting pattern designs forged connections among far-flung knitters, who discovered they were a global community rather than lone practitioners of a cozy hobby they’d learned from Mom.” – KATHY BLUMENSTOCK, THE WASHINGTON POST Author of seven books including the New York Times-bestselling KNITLANDIA, Clara has dedicated her life to exploring the stories behind, and qualities of, all the fibers that we wear on our bodies—and taking readers along for the journey. Through her writings, workshops, books, television and radio appearances, Clara has championed the notion of paying closer attention to what you knit and where it came from. She turned passion into profession in 2000 when she launched KNITTER'S REVIEW, the first online knitting magazine and community. Today she heads up THE WOOL CHANNEL, a multimedia platform dedicated to teaching and celebrating nature's original miracle fiber. She also writes THE DAILY RESPITE, a brief email newsletter called "an important newsletter for the times" by InsideHook. Parkes divides her time between city and country in Maine, always writing from a desk in the kitchen. “Through her woolly peregrinations, Parkes has become an unapologetic advocate for wool, a digital Cassandra in Allbirds, tweeting about the loss of this mill or that business, enjoining those of us who love the stuff — and can afford it — to not just consider the ‘food that goes into our bodies’ but also become ‘more mindful of what we put on them,’ because behind every skein of yarn there are dozens of stories.” —LESLIE PETROVSKI, VOGUE KNITTING
