When a Wyoming mom went looking for local yarn to feed her crafting needs ... she struck out. So with the help of her son, she started a business to make her own from Wyoming buffalo fiber. From WYPublicRadio's _Its_Me_Ivy_
can be found in a nondescript warehouse just outside of Buffalo. The company works with small woolgrowers from across the country, but mostly from Wyoming, to turn raw wool into a variety of products.
"Knowing where your food comes from, knowing where your garments are made, is definitely a growing interest in the United States, or globally as a whole, and it has been for some time," said Hostetler."Being in a vertically integrated company where the raw wool comes in one door and the finished product out the other, it's standard for us."Mountain Meadow Wool will run black wool for a few weeks before moving on to gray wool and then back to white wool.
"As it goes through the machine, it's almost like a hand spinner. So people see an old hand spinning wheel, they're using the foot pedal, and they're using their hands, so they're taking that thick rope, or that roving, and they're pulling it apart and making it thinner and that's called drafting it," said Hostetler."And then as they pull it apart, they're spinning the wheel, and that provides the twist.
"We've programmed it on, it's kind of an old computer, that uses three and a half inch floppy drives," laughed Hostetler."And then the machine knows the pattern that we're calling out. So it has a bunch of different feeders, a bunch of different cones of yarn, and it selects which cone is needed to make the pattern that we have programmed onto the machine.
Short fibers that have been removed during combing are put into dryer balls. Even damaged knitted products are reused.
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