Check out what Betabrand made out of the black fingering yarn they ordered from us! There are only 200 of these limited edition Black Sheep Hoodies available, so get one while you can! Wouldn’t this make a great Christmas present for the man in your life whose been handknitted to death? The video is very amusing and youthful, so you may need to watch it a couple of times and let the silliness wash over you.
P.S. – Click on ”Story” to read all about the great things Betabrand has said about Mountain Meadow Wool. We’re blushing over here!
Have you gotten a chance to feel up our latest yarn, Mountain Fusion Teton? It is fun and popular collaboration between Mountain Colors yarn and the Mountain Meadow Wool mill in Wyoming. We thought we’d let you in on the secret behind the process of how we make this unique yarn.
Teton is a wonderfully soft, 2-ply extra bulky weight yarn. It is made of 100% Mountain Merino wool yarn. We send two different weights – one “fat” and one “skinny” – to Mountain Colors, when then dye the plies separately in two different colorways. Then yjru send the yarn back to us at the mill and we ply it into the fabulous colors you see in the finished product.
Teton comes in 8 brilliant color schemes and is a huggable, squishy hank of softness. Best of all you can knit a VERY easy hat with one skein of Teton. It knits at 2.5 sts/inch. On the inside of the label is a free hat pattern…or find your own design and knit a quick gift for the holidays!!!
Check out this popular yarn at your local yarn store, or buy it directly from us here at Mountain Meadow Wool!
We’re shipping out 100 pounds of black undyed wooly yarn today!
Betabrand, a very fun and quirky online clothing company from San Francisco, just ordered a large amount of black wool fingering weight yarn from us to use in designing garments. With all of the super-cool stuff they invent, we just can’t wait to see what they turn our gorgeous yarn into. We suspect it will be a similarly cool garment, just like their custom Black Sheep Sweaters!
Our Limited Edition Powder River yarn and pattern collection is now available for ordering! We and the ladies of Y2Knit been working on our A Yarn Is Born project for months now, and we are so thrilled because we’ve finally got a birth announcement for you. Starting Saturday, Sept. 10, you can get your hands on our gorgeous new yarn as it goes public!
Our brand-new, All-American Powder River yarn is made up of 63 percent mountain merino, 25 percent American alpaca and 12 percent rambouillet wool. traight from the Wild West sheep ranches of Wyoming, this is a truly unique yarn sustainably produced by our team here at Mountain Meadow Mill.
With it comes the 12-piece Powder River pattern collection, brought to you by design team Y2Knit. The Powder River yarn comes with a stunning new pattern collection skillfully designed and detailed by Jill Wolcott that features everything from sweaters and shawls to hats, gloves, blankets and scarves. We are so thrilled by this limited edition yarn and we hope you’ll enjoy knitting with it as much as we enjoying making it!
If you are interested in stashing some Powder River yarn of your own, call your nearest Mountain Meadow Wool stockist for details. Find a retailer here.
Want to receive a free skein of Mountain Meadow Wool Powder River? This is your chance to get free yarn and the matching Limestone Scarf pattern to go with it! Here’s how: a sk your Local Yarn Shop to order Powder River yarn and patterns. Contact the ladies at Y2Knit and tell them that you told your LYS about the Powder River collection. Y2Knit and Mountain Meadow Wool will send you the goodies if the shop places an order!
This was the greeting that was heard all over the town of Buffalo the last part of July. Over 5,000 colorful, lively people from all over the United States and Europe gathered to celebrate the culture of the Basque people.
I turn into a bit of a Basque “wanna be” during these festivities. The food is delicious and there are handsome men, beautiful women and lots of dancing, competing, toasting and laughing.
The town of Buffalo looked lovely for the weekend and the parade down Main Street was one of the highlights. For 100 years, the Basque culture has been perpetuated in Johnson County and every other year NABO (North American Basque Organization) holds a festival in different areas of the country.
The Basque Sheepherding families are still a big presence in our area of Wyoming and we work directly with many Basque wool growers so it was fun to be a part of the party. Mountain Meadow Wool had a nice booth in the park and we were kept busy from dawn ’til dark talking and showing all the wonderful products we have from the wool grown in the high plains of Wyoming.
You may have read the words “trace back” and “traceability “on our website and thought to yourself, “what’s that?” The wool trace back feature that Mountain Meadow Wool provides is truly unique and a boon to the great ranching history we have here in Wyoming.
Wyoming is well known for the large bands of sheep that graze the mountains and plains of the cowboy state. Surrounded by that culture, we were surprised to find it was difficult to purchase products made from Wyoming wool.
When we started the mill, we knew how important it was to help these local ranchers. We also knew how much people who use the fiber and yarn we created enjoyed knowing where their products came from. It’s exciting to be able to look at a skein of yarn and learn about the ranch where it came from.
We are the first United States wool mill that can trace the wool back to the ranch where it came from. It is something unique that we do, in partnership with ScoringAg.com, that other mills don’t. We have a code on the label, and people can go on our website, type in the code, and find out which producer their wool came from and learn more about them.
Valerie and I are so excited to tell you all that Mountain Meadow Wool has been selected as the recipient of a United States Department of Agriculture Small Business Innovation Research (USDA-SBIR) award! We found out several weeks ago and have been bursting to share the news. This is Phase II of an ongoing study, and we worked very hard in February and March on getting this grant application accepted. To hear the news that we have received this competitive award has been thrilling, as you can imagine. This grant, which begins in September and will last for two years. When the work is completed, the “model washing system” will not only clean the wool, but will also pretreat the waste water. The hardest and dirtiest job is cleaning wool before it is turned into yarn – it uses a lot of water and we all know our water is a precious resource. The system will be an environmentally friendly alternative. By-products such as wool grease and sludge will be pulled out and resold, and the water will pass through a water polishing greenhouse at the end.
We hope that the grant will help us not only make an ecologically friendly system for our mill, but will help us be able to recreate this in an affordable manner for other mills around the nation, as many small, regional wool, alpaca and exotic fiber mills have expressed a keen interest in the results of this study. Mountain Meadow Wool is proud to claim environmental sustainability and using reduce, reuse and recycle as part of our manufacturing process.
Here’s an article from earlier in the year, before we got the grant, explaining what would happen if we did get it.
This week has been super busy here at the wool mill, and as always a learning experience! We started out the week with a visit from friends from Kyrgyzstan. Aizada Imports brought a trunk show to our little burg. Gorgeous stuff and our minds were awhirl with the possibilities. I particularly love to see a strong young woman in business. Especially from one of the “Stans” (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkmenistan) where women do not traditionally hold positions of power. The glue that holds us all together the world over is fiber. Hooray for Wool!
Today is a day of technological errors. QuickBooks, the PHONE, grrr. Now is a great day to bury myself in the soft, lovely wool. Shearing is around the corner. We have some wonderful growers and they grow primarily Rambouillet sheep. This is a breed of sheep that has a funny backstory. I am going to paraphrase, but here is the basic tale.
Years ago, we are talking middle ages, France had all of the textile mills and Spain had all of this lovely breed of Merino sheep. So France, in order to have top notch wool fabric they HAD to ask Spain. And Spain, realizing that they had a great thing going made it Illegal to export the Merino breed of sheep. Even punishable by death! Yes!
So the King of France decided on a plan. He was going to start an exotic animal zoo. Off went a letter requesting breeding animals of many of the exotic animals of Spain. And buried in the list was a request for…Merino sheep. Shhh.
So the King of Spain signed off and a whole menagerie of animals arrived in France, including a group of about 40 Merino sheep, which quickly were re-named: “Rambouillet” sheep after the name of the castle at which the zoo was housed. Today’s Rambouillet descended from French royalty and now wander the prairie. Oh how the mighty have fallen. Wooly remittance men.
These sheep are first cousins in the Merino family are now known for their hardiness and ability to thrive in sparse native grasslands, and the resulting fiber has a bit more loft and elasticity than the traditional Merino fiber. Don’t those horns remind you of crowns?
We feel like spring is about the show itself. The landscape has not changed much…still beige and sparkly blue skies. But there is just something in the slant of the sun promising more. The rancher near me always moves his mother-cows into a certain pasture which is on my way into town. When he does this, I know that baby calves will soon follow.
Owens Ranch baby lambs and Mama
We’ve also gotten some calls from over the mountain. Belmoral Farms and Anita Thatcher are getting ready to shear and are making plans for bringing fiber in. The Churro growers near Crow Heart, Wyoming have their shearer coming in April 2nd. Can’t wait to see the beautiful colors they are going to bring in. Belmoral Farms have sent Shetland and Scottish Black-Face and even a batch of Gotland. I can’t wait to see what that is like. I had just been reading something about Gotlands and then boom, here they came in.
Our Limited Edition 
With it comes the 12-piece Powder River pattern collection, brought to you by design team 
Valerie and I are so excited to tell you all that Mountain Meadow Wool has been selected as the recipient of a United States Department of Agriculture Small Business Innovation Research (USDA-SBIR) award! We found out several weeks ago and have been bursting to share the news. This is Phase II of an ongoing study, and we worked very hard in February and March on getting this grant application accepted. To hear the news that we have received this competitive award has been thrilling, as you can imagine. This grant, which begins in September and will last for two years. When the work is completed, the “model washing system” will not only clean the wool, but will also pretreat the waste water. The hardest and dirtiest job is cleaning wool before it is turned into yarn – it uses a lot of water and we all know our water is a precious resource. The system will be an environmentally friendly alternative. By-products such as wool grease and sludge will be pulled out and resold, and the water will pass through a water polishing greenhouse at the end.
Today is a day of technological errors. QuickBooks, the PHONE, grrr. Now is a great day to bury myself in the soft, lovely wool. Shearing is around the corner. We have some wonderful growers and they grow primarily Rambouillet sheep. This is a breed of sheep that has a funny backstory. I am going to paraphrase, but here is the basic tale.