We spoke with Clara Parkes for Season 7 of the Long Thread Podcast. Beginning in 2000 with Knitter's Review, Clara has taken readers with her on an exploration of knitting yarns, mostly devoting her energies to the amazing properties of wool. Her most recent projects are The Wool Channel and The Daily Respite.
Read the show notes or enjoy the full transcript below.
Welcome to the Long Thread Podcast, about spinning, stitching, and weaving by hand. The podcast is presented by Long Thread Media, publishers of Spin Off, Handwoven, PieceWork, and Little Looms magazines. Find us online at longthreadmedia.com.
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Anne Merrow (AM): I’m your host, Long Thread Media cofounder Anne Merrow. Clara Parkes founded Knitter’s Review, a website and newsletter that gave knitters information and reviews on yarns and notions. After years of running this site and writing several bestselling books, she got the offer of a lifetime, the chance to buy a bale of wool. When she accepted, she started a whole new phase of her career—not just reporter or yarn manufacturer, but leader of an expedition to see how wool becomes yarn today and guide through mills and dye houses for a group of subscribers. In keeping with the ambitious and uncharted nature of the project, she called it the Great White Bale after Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.
Clara, thanks for being here.
Clara Parkes (CP): Thank you for having me.
AM: So, you know, I could start way back at the beginning with Knitter’s Review, or I could ask you what you’re doing right now, but I’m actually going to start in the middle and say: Clara, would you tell me about the Great White Bale, and what possessed you to become a yarn maker?
CP: Ahh—so yes, that definitely is in the middle. What possessed me to do that? So we’re talking 2012, I believe it was. And so that’s 12 solid years of writing weekly product reviews, yarn reviews, books, tools, events, that kind of stuff. But primarily it was yarn. And I had swatched so many skeins of yarn at that point that I really was feeling like a jaded hag. “This? Ah, another skein of yarn. I know how that one’s going to knit up.” You know, like nothing could surprise me anymore. But also parallel to that was this fear of like, okay, I’m really good at analyzing a yarn, figuring out how it was made, what’s in it, how it’s going to behave, what it wants to become. But I have never . . . . I’m a hand spinner, I love to spin yarn, but I have never walked through the steps a commercial yarn company has walked through in order to bring a skein of yarn to the public. And I started to realize without really understanding that part of the process, I couldn’t possibly have a full depth of empathy and respect and understanding of what the challenges are so that I could appreciate the true miracle when a skein of yarn actually does reach people. [PAYWALL]
AM: So then you had this feeling that you wanted it to be kind of fresher, discover something new, and then this amazing opportunity kind of presented itself.
CP: Yeah. Like in any other field, it’s probably [that] I’d reached the point where you would go back to school, and you would get an advanced degree. And now I know you actually can get degrees—you can get a doctorate in wool. Would that not be the most amazing thing?
AM: Would be amazing.
CP: But that really wasn’t anything that I could do. And so at that point, I had a choice. There were a couple of yarn companies that I had talked with, and they were like, “We’d love for you to come on board. We’ll slap your name on a skein of yarn.” And I’m like, no, that’s not [it], this isn’t about just branding. I really want to be in the trenches on this.
CP: And that was when I was having a conversation with a friend who raises a big flock of superfine Saxon Merino sheep just north of New York City, Eugene Wyatt. And we have a very respectful friendship, like he would send me a skein of yarn and like that he just had spun at Green Mountain Spinnery and [say], “I’m really struggling with this weight, what do you think?” And I loved, I loved his fibers. And he would say things like, “I don’t have a flock, I have a responsibility.”
CP: You know what I mean? He’s not like, I just have a business, but I have a responsibility. And so when Ralph Lauren was looking for American wool to go into their Olympic garments after getting in trouble for making stuff in China, they contacted him. And I really rather love that he told me he gave them just the most ridiculous number he could come up with, because he didn’t want his fibers going into that kind of machine. And so I knew that really, his fibers were special to him.
CP: And it was at that time, and I was kind of explaining to him where I was: in this weird sort of boredom, lull in curiosity. And that’s when he said, “Well, I don’t know if you’re still thinking about making yarn. I happen to have a 676-pound bale of scoured Merino sitting at Bollman’s, and it’s more than I need right now . . . Dot dot dot . . .” And that it came fully formed, this idea: I could use this bale as my Trojan horse to get into these mills. Going in as a reporter or as a journalist, you don’t have the same . . . not so much as at stake, you don’t have the same level of involvement, an engagement or relationship with them, as if you are a client or a customer. So it took me a couple of months of just not answering his email and pretending that he hadn’t started something in my head that I knew, okay, I’m doomed. This is going to happen, this has to happen.
CP: But yes, several months later I thought, “Okay, Eugene, actually, I think I want to try this. Would you be willing?” So he kind of helped me at certain points: making introductions with Bollman’s in Texas—they’re the scouring plant where the wool was—and helping me get the bale of wool to Maine. I mean, just moving a bale of wool, it is . . . you can’t put it on a UPS truck, it’s a whole other world. So anyway, he was a guide and mentor and a real help during that whole experience.
CP: And that that’s what prompted the Great White Bale. It even came into my head, oh this is, this is like the great white bale, this is my quest to go out and figure out how this is done. What’s left in the US, also—can we even do this anymore? Yeah.
AM: And so that was the side of how you got to own the Great White Bale and what your request was going to be. But then as a person who got that email saying, “Here’s this project that I’m doing; do you want to come along with me?” That’s a whole other side of it. And that was a new way for you to have a relationship with your readers and your yarn community. What was that like? How did that shift, for you, the way that you thought about the people who were reading your work?
CP: It felt completely natural to me to invite people along, because I’ve always operated outside of the “establishment,” whatever that was, if there is one. So it made sense that I would bring people with me on this next adventure. But it was also . . . I knew I needed a healthy amount of fear and motivation. And it helped that right up front, I stated that I will be brutally honest with you about every step. So I do not promise perfection, but I’m going to be completely open about every step. And so even when I make mistakes, I’m going to be honest with you about it, and we will learn together. And that kind of gave me permission to go in with that mindset, versus, “Hey guys, I’ve made three different batches of yarn, aren’t they amazing? You can buy them here. #linkinprofile,” you know.
AM: Yeah.
AM: Give more room. You know, if something didn’t work out, here’s why. This is what we learned from it, this is what I might do differently next time.
AM: It’s kind of the difference between being involved and being committed. Because you were sort of putting this out there and you were saying, “I’m going to commit to making this yarn, and . . .”
AM: “I’m committed to writing, or to providing you with information and an experience, and please come along. I’m having a party, please come.”
CP: Mm-hmm. And it was before—there really wasn’t that much of a model yet. I don’t remember if Patreon were there in 2012, or even Kickstarter. I like trying things out myself. But it was a different relationship, having done Knitter’s Review, which was completely free for people. And so I do have a hard time . . . You know, hello—the plight to the creative person. I have a hard time charging for what I do. But this was helpful in that there was a physical component, and so that kind of gave me emotional permission to move forward and know that even if I completely bombed, and I . . . Well, you know, your brain kind of goes in that direction. Still, people are going to get a cute tote bag, they’re going to get a cool little journal that they can write in. You know, the Explorers are going to get actual skeins of yarn, and we’re going to have fun, whatever happens.
AM: I actually met Eugene a couple times, because he used to sell yarn at the Union Square Farmer’s Market. And when I was learning to knit, coming up in New York publishing, and I couldn’t afford anything, I would go down and I would occasionally buy yarn. I think it was mostly singles, and I didn’t really understand. The first time I went into a yarn store, I was shocked and appalled that I was going to need more than one pair of needles and that I could not just pick out my needles based on how much they cost . So when I was going and buying yarn from Eugene, I didn’t really understand anything other than soft pretty colors. This one’s cheaper than that one. And now I look back on it and I think, oh, what a wasted opportunity, if only I had known. But I think that was sort of that discovery era. I was doing this in 2004, 2005, at the new Union Square Farmer’s Market, just going and seeing his totes of wool, and he would come down, and he loved to talk about them.
CP: Oh yeah. I think that was half of the love for him, just standing there watching people interact with the wool from his flock. I really think so.
AM: And these mills and scouring companies . . . You know, you kind of got to go in the door as somebody who owned and was processing a bale. How many of the folks that they process yarn for go and ask them questions? Or is it just kind of “I’m sending you a bale, send me back some yarn, send me back some test skeins.” Because I’m wondering whether you got more of an experience than even the professionals do.
CP: Sort of. I could sound very noble and say, “I went in as a customer, and I got the complete experience that only a customer would.” But I also went in as like, “I’m a customer, but I’m creating a one-off. You’re never going to do this again.” And so right there, that’s not very appealing to them, because they have to do all this work to get everything calibrated, to create this product X, and then we’re never going to do it again. “Oh, and by the way, that’s all the wool I have. If you mess it up, you’ve broken my heart. Oh, and by the way, I have—I can’t remember how many total—over a thousand people who will be watching, and they will know that you screwed up, because I’m going to come to the mill and film you screwing up.
CP: So it took a generous kind of person to open up and be willing for me to step in there. But I think the smaller mills, I think they are open to having people come, their customers come. I found they were just so eager to explain what they were doing to someone who was curious and cared and respected what they were doing. It kind of broke my heart in a beautiful way. Like, wow, these people know so much and they’re willing to share. How often do you see that in this world? You know, usually there’s so much knowledge-hoarding, kind of protectionist. And they were absolutely not—totally open. And they wanted to know, “What other mills are you going to? Oh wow, I heard they have an air splicer . . .” It’s a such a small world that they all know each other, more or less. So it was fun.
AM: Domestic wool production is not all that common anymore, so there’s sort of a band of people who are keeping this going, trying to keep it a viable industry all around that. You know, “Hey, here’s somebody who’s excited and wants to tell people about it and isn’t just telling me, you know, I need you to get your price down by XYZ, or I’m going to ship it to fill-in-the-blank foreign country.”
CP: Well, that’s part of it. I think all of these people were still very freshly traumatized from the fallout from NAFTA. That was a very common thread, pardon the pun, but just overnight business evaporated for a lot of them. And so they had a healthy dose of skepticism about what could be brought back to this country, but yet they still had that spark of hope. So it’s a nice combination.
AM: So what you’ve learned as part of this process, was that part of what became Vanishing Fleece, which was one of your bestselling books?
CP: Yeah, that was it. And I’ve kind of felt like I’ve done what I can. Like The Knitter's Book of Yarn I’m very, very proud of, and I feel like it stands on its own. And The Knitter's Book of Wool stands on its own, and The Knitter's Book of Socks stands on its own. And it was safe to move deeper into the supply chain, or just into the storytelling about why all of this matters and who is making your yarn. And yeah—a look at who’s doing this, why it deserves respect and support around the world, not just in the United States. I mean, that was something I hope was clear to people, that it’s called Adventures in American Wool, but it’s not intended to be a nativist manifesto about why America’s . . . Right?
AM: Right.
CP: But it’s kind of the plight of domestic textile manufacturing in wool in countries around the world in, when did that come out, 2019?
AM: And I think that that raises a good point about . . . There are different ways of looking at what’s to be preserved, whether it’s American wool—is it different varieties of sheep and fibers? Is it small production? There’s not just one lens to look through it and say, “This is important and valuable.” There are certainly places that you can look around and say, “I value this property and so I’m going to buy this.” But just as you can buy multiple skeins of yarn, I can be really psyched about a woman in Portugal who’s trying to preserve traditional Portuguese breeds of yarn and also be really excited about two handspinner’s flocks with four sheep. And also be really excited about Shaniko.
CP: Yeah, it’s a different interpretation of the word “local” for me. Like spiritually local, or ethically local.
AM: I like that. I wonder whether that ties in with something that you’re working on now, which is The Wool Channel. Can you tell me a little bit about The Wool Channel? The reason I say that I wonder if it’s tying in is because it seems to be about various things: great stories, various elements in the larger wool world to be interested in and happy about and celebrate.
CP: Yeah, in working on the Great White Bale and then researching and expanding and deepening it for Vanishing Fleece, it became really clear to me that part of what wool needs as a fiber, as an industry, as a farming way of life, of preserving green spaces, all of that . . . Companies are not going to invest in wool for their clothing unless they know there’s going to be a market for it. And at that time, there was still all of the PETA, you know, “Wear plastic because it’s nicer than wool. That’s less cruel. Those poor sheep are just really suffering when you sheer them.” And there was nobody fighting back. And so I thought, “All right, I feel good about where the yarn world is now.” A lot of really good people had entered the sphere of breed specific small batch, really interesting yarns with stories.
CP: And where I could be helpful is kind of shifting further upstream to help build this consumer movement. And also, people in the textiles world, weavers and spinners and dyers, they’re actually brilliant marketing agents. They’re like perfect secret agents out in the world, because we have an extraordinary—but I didn’t realize until I kind of went deeper into this world, that by virtue of touching these fibers and working with them so intimately, we actually have a very advanced sensitivity to them and understanding about them. And we tend to be surrounded by a lot of people who might not share our passion. And so, how perfect: we are seeding the world with our knowledge and our passion and our understanding.
CP: And so that’s kind of where I started the Wool channel. It was, “Okay, those of you who’ve been with me so far, now it’s time for us to take one step even further. I’m going to tell you about other really cool stuff that’s happening with wool, all the way down to how they’re using keratin in cosmetic products or using wool in composite materials for like canoes, or knife blades, or research about wool helping eczema sufferers. Or there’s a wool car cover . . .” And so I call it a platform, a publication, and a community. But there’s a free component where every two weeks I write something called the Wool Wire.
CP: And it’s really just sharing all this cool, interesting stuff that I’m finding out. People who’ve won awards, or there’s a woman in the UK who just won an innovation award. She’s working on creating wool ropes that can be used like for the garden, but also to help repopulate the plankton or kelp beds without plastic rope, which has been polluting the oceans with microplastics. Or there’s a guy in Ireland who is now making pillows, which I have . . . Oh, don’t even get me started about sleeping in wool. So anyway, I chose a model where it is reader supported, so that I could speak absolutely honestly and without any strings about anything. And that’s after 14, 15 years of Knitter’s Review. I always had that line with advertisers, but it was advertiser-supported, but it got harder and harder to feel comfortable being fully honest about things. And it’s also like, “You’re in this with me, all right? Let’s do this.” So it’s reader supported versus advertiser supported. And I’ve tried a couple of arrangements with companies and again, I think it needs to stay reader supported because it just gets awkward. Expectations are weird, and I don’t like the whole influencer thing—it just kind of makes my skin crawl. I, I like to be able to say, “I love this product because I love this product, and I’m an idiot. . . I didn’t do a business deal with them, so I’m not going to make any money off of my recommendation.” I wish I could, but I just don’t want to do that. Yeah. So that’s a very long answer to what it is. Yeah. That’s what the wool channel is.
AM: That sort of makes sense with your background in journalism and reporting. That was what you were doing before you became a wool professional, a yarn professional. Is that right?
CP: It is. But I was writing about things I didn’t understand. Talk about imposter syndrome—you know, French and art history, double major, living in the Bay Area, trying to work in publishing, and what was available in publishing in the nineties was tech. first it was blurb writing, travel writing for a company that became Travelocity. And then I moved into DBMS Magazine. I’m sure you’ve heard of it?
AM: Absolutely. On my coffee table.
CP: Yeah. Copy of it on your bedside table. What’s funny is, now when I think about it, I actually do understand. We interviewed this company called Walmart, and they were doing this new thing called data warehousing, where they were analyzing sales information at the register. And now it’s all so completely common.
CP: But yeah, I was doing that, and every time I tried to quit, it was the golden handcuffs: “Well, what about if we make you an associate editor? What about if we make you a senior associate editor?” But the difference between writing about something you’re constantly struggling to understand, and you just . . . like, I don’t know about object related database connectivity. I don’t know any of this. I could tell you about Proust.
CP: So when I started writing about yarn, but using the training, because I would edit the product reviews. And I loved this whole new thing, this email newsletter technology—I could use all of that and apply it to a subject that I did deeply love and understand and want to know more about. And suddenly everything fell into place. So it was just finally, “I’m in my realm,” and that’s how it happened.
AM: And all of these things come back together. Because one of the most important things for me about Knitter’s Review when I was supposed to be doing a job as an editor of general fiction, but I was actually spending a lot of my time in the forums on Knitter’s Review. And maybe that’s why that job didn’t work out so well. But that whole community element of it, and the way that Knitter’s Review and Knitty, I think, were part of this surge, this groundswell of where knitting became such a force. But then again, that’s when I arrived. So clearly that’s when the party started, right? I mean, there’ve always been knitters.
CP: There was no party until you started. Yeah, it’s true. I don’t know, I think I was just extremely lucky to have entered it in 2000, back when there was this new thing where you could buy search terms. “Wow, I’ve never heard of this before.” On all these search engines that are gone now, where an average person could spend 10 cents a click on the word “yarn,” and people were so hungry for this information because it’s when suddenly we were able to buy yarn online without touching it. And there was no way to find . . . there was no database about yarn. There was nothing. And you’d look on the website for the yarn store and it would say, “This lovely, fluffy, wonderful, soft and succulent, tender yarn.” That doesn’t help me. I need to understand more. So it’s this convergence of where how people were getting their yarn and \ where people were hanging out and everybody just seemed to . . . I think I launched the forums in 2001, or was it 2002? And just instantly, everybody flocked. They needed a place.
AM: So far I have not commented on “I’m skirting,” and people have flocked, and you commented on thread. But I’m laughing at the metaphors in our language. Just like the wool channel is saying, “Oh my gosh, there’s opportunities for wool everywhere,” there’s certainly conversations about wool and yarn in just floating in the air that we don’t even notice.
CP: That is what makes it so much fun. You will never, ever, ever, ever get bored, because we’re talking about this material, this fiber, that has been with us for 10,000 years. These animals that have been anywhere you look—that’s one of my favorite parlor tricks. You name a place, you name a time, I will tell you there’s a wool connection. And everywhere you look, you will always find some little pocket. Even on a Caribbean island, you will find there’s a flock of sheep there. How did they end up there? And it’s this fantastic window through which you can see and explore the world. I love it. And it adds so much of a deeper experience of the subject when you think about how many generations and generations of people before you have felt the same way or have relied on this material and have cared for these animals.
CP: And as then it becomes kind of this moral or spiritual obligation to do whatever I can to keep it here. And especially now, it just makes so much sense, the more we learn about regenerative agriculture and the role that grazing livestock, responsibly managed, can play in that. And the sheep need our defending, when you have people saying, “No, no agriculture, any agriculture with animals is bad. We just need to focus on, you know, using up all of California’s water for almond trees so we can have almond milk instead.” And the sheep can’t defend themselves, so it makes more sense now than it ever has before.
AM: And I do remember, when you were doing yarn reviews for Knitter’s Review, being so astonished to learn that there were these small breed-specific yarns. There’s a couple that I can remember that you reviewed and I was like, wow. So in between all of these reviews that you need to know about this yarn, because when you go to the yarn store, it’s one of the four yarns that you’re almost certain to find, or this yarn seems like a really good idea, but it actually was not such a good idea. But then there were the be these little . . . I think there might have been a review of a Tunis yarn, maybe.
CP: Loony Tunis. Yes. Loony—
AM: Tunis.
CP: I still have a skein of that. That’s helping people understand, if you go to a sheep and wool festival, people need to understand there is no one-size-fits-all wool. You’re dealing with hundreds and hundreds of distinct breeds, and there is a breed for every need. There is, which rhymes beautifully, but it’s also true. So helping people understand, this is the context of Tunis, this is how beautiful the sheep is. You know, you want the yarn just because of that face—how could you not want wool from a sheep with that face?—but to set people’s expectations to understand, this skein is not trying to be a supermodel. It exists in a different realm. Judge it within that realm and enjoy it. Just understand, if all you expect is wonder bread, then you’re going to be shocked when you hold a loaf of rye. And you’re not going to understand it, but understand kind of how all the grains work and how they taste and how they combine, then you can appreciate it for what it is.
AM: Yeah. And you know, some days you like a good Wonder Bread . . .
CP: Totally. Oh, I love my fluffy Wonder Bread, or baguettes. You know what I mean?
AM: Yeah.
CP: With a lot of butter on them.
AM: When you were talking about how fiber lovers are a great marketing engine, I was thinking about an idea that I had a couple years ago. We’ve never been able to devote as much time and attention as it deserves, but the name I had for it was The Great Aspinneration. Somebody in the UK mentioned that she had been aspinnerated, and I just latched onto that. And she didn’t go on to become a huge spinner, but I remember reading that post, and it stuck with me. And the idea was that, as the publishers of Spin Off, we can talk a lot to spinners, and we can go out into the world and try to talk to people who aren’t spinners, but the people who are spinners know a lot more people than we do who should become spinners. So please go out, be deputized, become missionaries for this thing that other people will love. You will love this thing. Do this thing because you will love it.
CP: And wear what you make. And if someone comments . . . This is my feeling about anything with wool. Of course, with COVID and cooties, it became more challenging. But the minute anybody says, “That’s a beautiful sweater,” [say,] “Well thank you. I made it myself. This is made from Targhee that came from the Pacific Northwest. You want to touch it?” Start a conversation. And these are people that you might know, they will be more open to trusting you because they know you in their real life, versus a magazine of spinners and knitters and weavers. And they do make absolutely brilliant infiltrators of the non-textile world. No, that’s not right—"Infiltrator,” that makes it sound bad. But just Johnny Appleseed: plant the seed of curiosity. And there’s the perpetual comeback of, “Oh I thought wool was scratchy.” What better way to counter that than, “Oh, it is not—touch this. You feel how soft that is.”
CP: And that’s part of what I love doing with The Wool Channel is helping people have facts at their fingers for if someone says what I’ve heard that shearing is cruel. Is that true? To be able, not argumentative, but just factually state, “Well, actually no, it needs to happen. And here’s some facts behind it. Here’s why it’s not in a shearer’s best interest to abuse any animal owned by the person employing them.” Yes. So, just little tidbits. Ans it’s dropping little droplets of facts. I find that interesting. Facts make the most wonderful currency that you can then take and share. Like, I have a secret. Do you want to know a secret? I know something cool. And when you tell people about it, they’re going to think you are cool for telling them about vitamin D3. Guess where it comes from? Lanolin. It’s just fun. I like trying to find delights like that as well.
AM: I’m getting ready to go back to a college reunion and the last college reunion I went to, I was talking with somebody who had gone off and done the more traditional . . . I think he’s a journalist in some sort of political sphere. Nice guy. Very smart. But I tend to talk in a somewhat self-deprecating way, which I shouldn’t. But, oh gosh. you know, I work with yarn and spinning, and he said, oh, I mean, I, they’ve got that pretty much figured out now, right? And I was like, no, they’re synthesizing spider silk. I think he backed away, not because he was bored, but because he probably thought I was going to bring a spider out of my bag and show him, sort of like, “Here’s something you don’t know and I must tell you.”
CP: Yes. Oh, that, that perception. It’s like, “Oh, excuse me, you think they’ve figured out how to put tobacco, wrap it up, and call it a cigar. But they still have magazines about it. There’s this public perception sometimes that you’re up against.
AM: I’m afraid I might have invited it a little bit in how I mentioned it. He wasn’t saying, “Well, what you do is small.” It was just hearing that reflected back to me, I thought, no, I need to say.
AM: So this synthesizing spider silk is kind of cool as a concept. And I was thinking you had all kinds of fibers run through your hands. I mean, when you were doing Knitter's Review, certainly most of it was wool, but there were lots of other kinds of fiber too. I remember a cotton angora that you reviewed. What was it about wool that kind of stuck with you?
CP: Part of it has to do with the elasticity and how it dances with your hands, in terms of maintaining tension. With less elastic fibers like cotton, or even alpaca to a certain point, your hands have to do more work to maintain the tension. Silk, definitely. So there’s that component, but it was also just even within this realm of wool, the variety was so tremendous. I would kinda get into a mental place of, “Wow, this came from a specific region. I wonder how did the sunrise, how damp was it in the morning? What kind of birds? Did they smell wood smoke when they woke up? Were they high up on a hill or low?” There’s so much more going on. I do think there is this whole notion of terroir. that you have with wine or chocolate. But I think it definitely exists in wool as well.
CP: And on a larger commercial scale, it tends to be all kind of blended into this homogeneous lowercase-w wool. But when you can go through the processes of taking it from animal to finished fiber, or from source to finished yarn and finished product, you can preserve so much more of the story. And I guess that’s the final thing. It’s just the storytelling. It’s such an incredibly fun vehicle for explaining so much more than just the wool itself, but like the human condition, how humans have moved throughout this planet, what our priorities were, what the struggles are now. It’s just, it’s this really great little sports car to drive through the world.
AM: Part of the reason I was thinking about that is that I know somebody who is, completely devoted to spinning cotton and we call her Johnny Cotton seed. So it sort of made me think about that. It doesn’t work to talk about wool, but you have that role and wool encouraging people to try it, teaching them about it, sort of giving your enthusiasm for it.
CP: Oh. And anybody who can be enthusiastic about that in the realm of cotton. I have to find out more about this, because yeah, there’s another one. Whoa. All of human history. So much can be explained through textiles.
AM: So where in this journey did you become a handspinner?
CP: I’m not sure, it was pretty early on. It might have even right about when I started Knitter’s Review, 2001. I’m thinking I had already started going to Halcyon Yarn in Bath and walking up and down the aisles and smelling the spinning oil and the lanolin. So I got my first wheel around 2000. Around the same time. Yeah.
AM: And that was before it became a much more popular thing to do. I started seeing it more—once again, I arrived at the party and that’s when the party started—but I do think that a lot of, I was one of many people who were learning in the 2005 to 2010 era.
CP: No, there was no hand spinning before 2005, when you started. No, I really think it started to take off when it did because we were in that weird phase of technology adoption where we were losing handwriting. Expressions of yourself were harder and harder to come by. You now have a font. It’s not, you know, this this something that’s deeply personal. And, also that was a period of time where you could sit now at a computer and just stare at a screen and wiggle your fingers. And at the end of the day, well, I guess I sort of did something. I sent a bunch of emails and I edited 12,000 words. Huh. But there’s this kind of soulful yearning to that. The hands were saying, Hey, wait a minute. Mm-hmm. , we are used to expressing more. We need something. And I think so many people turned to knitting or to crochet and to spinning. Absolutely. If you can get that out. And the need has only increased, I think since then,
AM: In some ways it’s an escape. And in other ways it’s a connection.
CP: Yes.
AM: Being able to take time away from your technical stuff. And we started having connections with peo le all over the world. But that sort of rootedness, having something real, that wooly smell. Does your house smell like wool, Clara?
CP: Probably not. No, I don’t think, but I think there has to be a cellular connection as human beings. There has to be, whether it’s working with wool or with cotton or flax or silk or just, there has to be. So yeah, you’re absolutely right. There is this grounding kind of connecting, but it’s also therapeutic. It’s helping your brain process the complexities of life. It’s also a fantastic escape. But as you know, you can only escape so far and then you drop a stitch, or it breaks and you have to reattach, and it doesn’t let you go too far from what you’re doing. Right. No, no, no. Was it Einstein who presented the theory of parallel play?
AM: I don’t know.
CP: Of needing to have a counterbalance, one thing needing a counterbalance. Or I’m thinking of Sherlock Holmes, how he played the violin. And I think for a lot of people working with fibers, letting them run through your fingers, that fills that need really well.
AM: That’s true. You and I have both done a really good job of turning our—“hobby” can be pejorative, but turning our craft into our jobs. And I’ve been joking lately that next I need to find a job sitting on the couch, because I do an awful lot of that lately, because everything else turns into work. But I wouldn’t do anything else. That’s a problem.
CP: Yeah, it is a problem when you turn your passion into your profession, then “Uh oh, I need to, I don’t know, take up fly fishing or something completely different.” Not fly fishing. Making flies, though. And that has wool in it. You can make flies with wool.
AM: I don’t think I’d want to do anything else, though. It’s not like I’d want to go get a job doing anything just so that I could, in the two hours every evening and two days every weekend, that I could just fit all of my fiber stuff into that little time.
CP: No, it’s pretty good.
AM: I’ll keep it.
CP: Plus I feel like I’ve made myself unemployable for anything else at this point. Or I just don’t know if I could do that anymore—be beholden to somebody else. I like being beholden to readers, because that’s a respect relationship. But being beholden to some corporation that has more complicated layers.
AM: Well, or being beholden to an industry that I didn’t deeply care about as much. And it would be really hard for me to go and work in widgets.
CP: You’re not going to work for Exxon?
AM: I definitely don’t have any employable skills for them.
AM: So we’ve talked a lot about how wool is the connecting . . . I’m going to say thread! A love for wool is something that’s been refined through your work. But I know that it’s not the only thing that you do. You do have other interests, and you also have other connections with readers. Early on during the pandemic, I became aware that you were putting out something every day that was just sort of like a gift, a little gem. And I know you as Clara, the wool and yarn person, but this was just, you know, “The whole world has gone crazy. Have a happy moment.” And that’s still something you’re still doing?
CP: I am still doing it. Yeah. It was March 2020, and like everybody, everything that I had planned for the year was canceled. Every single thing. And I was slipping, like a lot of people, and writing is how I make sense of the world. And I really couldn’t do a long-form anything. It was just so disturbing. And I discovered this new thing called Substack, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of it. It was not so known then, but I kind of thought, “I wonder, if I’m slipping, I wonder if other people are too.” And I had looked around . . . what I could use as just a daily affirmation, or a daily touchpoint or something, even just to remind me what day it was. And I couldn’t find anything. So that was when I decided, okay, I’m going—physician heal myself.
CP: So I started writing this thing called the Daily Respite. And kind of the tagline is, “A brief interval of relief in your inbox every morning.” And as the pandemic has progressed, at first I thought, well, you know, the pandemic is over (it’s not), but now that’s it’s shifted, well, I don’t think there’s a place for this. And then I realized, “Wow, I really love this very, very much.” And I’ve built this community of thousands of other like-spirited people who also need something every morning from a friend. You know, that daily, “You there? I’m here. We good? All right, let’s go.” And sometimes it’s a poem.
CP: It’s moved more into kind of . . . I realize I’m very lucky, living where I do in Maine with lots of nature all around me and connections to it, with apple trees that my great great-grandfather planted. So taking people out into that with me, and telling stories about the ghosts or what’s happening in the woods. And it’s sort of about that. But then there will be a quote from Thoreau in there just to help get all of your inner pieces aligned before you go out into the world. And as it gets louder and more challenging, and there are more forces trying to distract you or get you off-kilter, I feel it’s a great privilege to be able to help keep my people tethered and keep us all in a good place. And who doesn’t need that reminder that you’re not alone? And let’s look at this bird for a moment. Let’s listen to this hermit thrush. This is the first hermit thrush of the year. Let’s watch the waves for a minute. Every Sunday we go out and I just share a video somewhere outside and just—“Okay, you good? All right, let’s go. I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Onwards.” And yeah. And it’s been that every single morning. I think I just found a number, over 1300 good mornings I’ve sent out.
AM: So when you started, did you think that you would have enough to say for 1300 mornings?
CP: When I started, I really couldn’t come up with more than two or three sentences, my brain was so jangly. So it really was brief. And at the beginning it was a bit more puppy videos, or a sheep on a trampoline. And then as things sort of found their way, and okay, I can put my feet on the ground, it felt more natural to step into longer narrative.
CP: But never too long. It’s a great privilege to be in anybody’s inbox every morning. So I don’t, like, “Hi guys, it’s Thursday. Let me tell you about the shoes I bought.” It has to be something that would comfort me if I read it. All I need to do is just look out the window or go for a walk, and just as you still the mind and are quiet, you start to notice things. So it’s helpful for me as well. And then look, an interesting little mound of moss. Well, I wonder what little animals could live in there. That’s their entire world. Well, let’s think about how would that work. Do they have lights? Do they go to work? It’s just coming up with strange, fun, magical, hypothetical situations. Or like today it was the fiddlehead ferns that are just starting to come up in Maine, and they really do look like they’re stretching their legs. And they’re yawning, but they’re still in that listening mode, because they have so much to catch up on. They’ve been asleep all winter. And soon enough they will unfurl and they’ll join the chorus. But right now they’re just listening. So I might go down later and tell them some stories.
AM: That sounds so wonderful. I don’t know of a lot of other fiber world folks who are doing Substacks, but there’s two others that I know of that are pretty special: Sarah Swett, who’s actually going to be one of our next guests on the Long Thread Podcast, has one that she calls the Gusset, which I just love, partly because when she came out with it, I was just figuring out how to put a gusset in a top. And then Kristin Nicholas has been writing about her farm and her various fiber art and all kinds of art pursuits. So there are some pretty cool Substacks out there.
CP: And those two, they are super cool powerhouses.
AM: So Clara, thank you so much for your time. I could literally talk to you about wool and yarn and stories all day long, but I should let you get off to those fiddlehead ferns. So thank you so much.
CP: Oh, thank you, Anne. It’s been a pleasure.
AM: Thanks to Treenway Silks and Peters Valley School of Craft for sponsoring this episode. Thank you for listening to the Long Thread Podcast. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please rate the show and leave us a comment on Apple Podcast or your favorite podcast platform. Thanks again.
