Explains the crucial factors that spinners, knitters and weavers need to know in order to create yarn, describing 21 different breeds of sheep, their characteristics and history and the structure, grease content and fiber diameter of each one's fleece.

Discover the satisfying fun of spinning your own yarn! This step-by-step guide shows you how to create 80 distinctive yarn types, from classics like mohair bouclé to novelties like supercoils. Covering the entire spinning process, Sarah Anderson describes the unique architecture of each type of yarn and shares expert techniques for manipulating and combining fibers. Take your crafting to a new level and ensure that you have the best yarn available by spinning it yourself.

This one-of-a-kind encyclopedia shines a spotlight on more than 200 animals and their wondrous fleece. Profiling a worldwide array of fiber-producers that includes northern Africa’s dromedary camel, the Navajo churro, and the Tasmanian merino, Carol Ekarius and Deborah Robson include photographs of each animal’s fleece at every stage of the handcrafting process, from raw to cleaned, spun, and woven. The Fleece & Fiber Sourcebook is an artist’s handbook, travel guide, and spinning enthusiast’s ultimate reference source all in one.

With this compact portable reference in hand, crafters can quickly and easily look up any of 100 different sheep breeds, the characteristics of their fleece, and the kinds of projects for which their fleece is best suited. Each breed profile includes a photograph of the animal and information about its origin and conservation status, as well as the weight, staple length, fiber diameter, and natural colors of its fleece. This is a great primer for beginners, and a handy guide for anyone who loves working with fleece.

The renowned knitter shares her year-long adventure through America’s colorful, fascinating—and slowly disappearing—wool industry. Join Clara Parkes as she ventures across the country to meet the shepherds, dyers, and countless workers without whom our knitting needles would be empty, our mills idle, and our feet woefully cold. Along the way, she encounters 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. By the end of the book, you’ll be ready to set aside the backyard chickens and add a flock of sheep instead.

A guide to using handspun yarns--including such fibers as alpaca, merino, cormo, and more--features detailed instructions for twenty-six innovative projects that demonstrate how the materials' unique properties, fiber, and texture can transform a piece.

How to select and wisely use single-breed wool yarn for knitting, crocheting, and other needlecrafts.

This stunning collection of portraits shows sheep as you’ve never seen them before. Featuring commissioned studio photography of champion breeds styled to perfection prior to competition, the animals showcased here are works of ovine art. Beautiful color portraits of 42 different breeds from around the globe are accompanied by graphic charts containing all the essential breed information. There’s also a potted history of sheep, plus reportage photography of the behind-the-scenes primping and preening at the agricultural shows, to document the care lavished on prizewinning sheep as well as the nail-biting judging process. Whether you regard it as a photographic exposition, an amusing objet d’art, or a shepherd’s delight packed with visual and texual breed information, this is a unique giftbook destined to adorn coffee tables around the globe.

Readers can't help but get entangled in this USA Today bestselling series. This summer in Sea Harbor, Massachusetts, one of the Seaside Knitters gets tangled up with a precocious granddaughter, and another stands accused of sending a local resident on a permanent vacation… As Izzy and the Seaside Knitters prepare her yarn studio for the tourist season, fellow knitter Birdie Favazza has her hands full with her granddaughter Gabby. The little girl soon becomes a fixture in the town and even strikes up a friendship with a reclusive local fisherman, Finnegan, who is the source of much local turbulence. Then lobsterwoman Cass Halloran stumbles over the old fisherman—his body covered with leaves and sea grass and wearing the yellow fleece vest she once made for him. When Cass becomes a suspect in his murder the Knitters must rally to protect their friend. Soon the Seaside Knitters will discover that caring for Gabby while casting their net for a killer is a tricky business, indeed. They’ll have to keep their wits about them as they piece together the clues…or one of their own will wind up knitting behind bars.

This inspiring illustrated guide teaches experienced spinners to make beautiful designer yarns and encourages them to be more creative and have more fun with spinning. Handspun yarns can be white, lumpy, gray, and precise--or they can be as colorful and deliciously textured as the spinner's imagination. Presented are instructions on applying dye to fibers in new, exciting ways; predicting how novelty yarns will look in finished fabrics; blending fibers for color and texture effects; spinning singles and plied yarns; and using these fantastic new yarns in weaving, knitting, and crocheting. Spinners will also add corespun, boucle, snarl, knotted, and tufted yarns to their spinning repertoire.