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 I’ve discovered that the spinning wheel feels a lot like the pottery wheel, and spending time behind one wheel or the other is an important rhythm of my everyday life. I make playful skeins of yarn from natural wool fibers, laced with sun-dyed color and textured with beads and bits of found objects that are suitable for knitting, crochet or weaving. The amazing weavers and handspinners I’ve met in Ayacucho, Peru are a constant inspiration to me. They spin natural wool fibers by hand and tint them with natural vegetal dyes, sometimes creating as many as 14 or 15 shades of a single color to create intricate weavings that look three dimensional.
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 This Navajo family has lived on the vast high mesa grasslands since the 1800’s and are helping to reintroduce the Navajo Churro breed of sheep, which was nearly extinct just 30 years ago. Navajo Churro wool comes in an amazing rainbow of hues including black, brown, silver, grey, beige, cream, white and red mesa. The wool fibers are especially long (6 to 7 inches) which make them ideal for handspinning and other fiber arts. Navajo Churro sheep are hardy and lean, roaming up to 10 miles a day to graze freely in the high desert grasslands but returning to the ranch corral at night for water. The yarn is available in natural colors or dyed with seasonal plants to expand the palette to include mistletoe (green), snakeweed (gold), wild carrot root (orange), tumbleweed, Mormon Tea, Navajo Tea, lichen, sagebrush and Prickly pear (lilac).
Enter Yarn Gallery
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My search for local sources of sheep’s wool recently took me to the Navajo Nation in northern Arizona. I met a family there who has had great difficulty finding markets for their beautiful multi-colored Navajo Churro wool and handspun, vegetal dyed yarn. We’ve forged a partnership to bring their beautiful fiber and yarn to a wider audience, and it’s available to the public every Saturday morning at the Downtown Phoenix Public Market. Proceeds from the sale of this family’s yarn are recycled back to them, creating new economic opportunities to continue their livelihood.