Mountain Meadow Wool is very dear to us. First of all, the mill is practically a next door neighbor out here in this neck of the woods! So the three and a half hour drive on the wide open highway to Buffalo WY made for a great day trip in mid May, and it was our very first official yarn order for the shop. Karen and team were in the midst of helping welcome a Trip For Knitters group in Buffalo. We heard about the group when we were working with Karen on our order, then happened to run in to a few of the traveling knitter gals when we had lunch downtown! Buffalo has some nice antique shops, and we made our first shop furniture purchase in one of them. All in all a very productive day.
Even if Mountain Meadow wasn't a local yarn, I'm pretty sure we would want to stock it because of their mission statement: "To revitalize the American wool industry, preserve the West, and create American made high-quality products through eco-friendly operations and fair prices for Ranchers."
All yarn from Mountain Meadows can be traced to one of 16 family ranches and you can feel the lanolin still in the fibers when you're working with it because of the environmentally friendly cleansers that are used in processing. The yarn is soft and lustrous - a joy to feel on your needles and of course a treat to wear in a finished project. The family run mill collaborates with several different companies for custom work. They offer tours; it's amazing to see the fleece-to-yarn process and we highly recommend it. There aren't many mills left in our country! The Mountain Meadows website has some nice links to family ranches that they work with, too.
We have three terrific yarns from Mountain Meadows: Alpine, Liluria, and Tweed.
Alpine is 100% Merino, kettle dyed, 255 yards: great sweater yarn, excellent stitch definition. It was a joy to work into this little sweater, knit by our friend Pam (pattern Tenderheart by tincanknits) (Linden tree's heart shaped leaf was a bonus don't you think?!)
The tweeds are natural shades of undyed merino in a worsted weight, 200 yards. Great sweater yarn! And lilluria is a sport weight merino/alpaca blend, full of undyed natural beauty. Great sweater yarn! Ok - sweaters must be on the brain. Let's substitute "sweater" for mittens, hats, cabled scarves, shawls, cowls, warm socks, and beautiful blankets. In short, the Mountain Meadows yarns that we have would work beautifully for just about anything you can think of. We are really proud to stock this yarn and feel like we have good neighbors as Mountain Meadows yarn skeins right here in the shop every day since we know that we truly are Neighbors -- bringing all kinds of meaning to the concept of keeping things local.
Thanks for reading along!
