It all started with a bottleneck. Hartford sheep farmer Peggy Allen and her husband started a flock in 2012 and were happily bringing their wool to Hampton Fiber Mill in Richmond for processing. But when that mill stopped doing custom processing in 2017, Allen was forced to turn to a mill in Pennsylvania.
Then, around the start of the Covid pandemic, Allen received a call from a friend, Amanda Kievet, a web developer and fellow sheep owner who was looking for something different to do – work that involved her hands. She had an interest in wool and fiber, and also recognized that there was a lack of milling options in the area. In short, Kievet had decided she wanted to start a wool mill in the Upper Valley.
Allen knew that the equipment in the former Hampton mill was idle, and before long the two formed a partnership, made a deal to purchase that equipment and were commuting to Richmond for training from that mill’s former operator, Michael Hampton. Allen and Kievet were also able to secure a commercial building in White River Junction and Junction Fiber Mill officially opened its doors in March 2021.
This short synopsis does no justice to the amount of work and learning the pair devoted to envisioning and executing on their plan. But all that work was quickly rewarded with business. “From the moment we hung our shingle out, we were slammed,” says Allen.
A business evolution
“In the beginning, when we were just doing custom processing, it was just Amanda and I running everything,” says Allen. The plan hadn’t been to create their own line of products, but simply to provide a milling service for others. But as the flood of custom processing orders came in, so did questions from others, wanting to purchase yarn. “I’d say it was about seven or eight months in where we said, ‘you know, we could set aside a little bit of the mill’s capacity to create our own line of yarn,’” she recalls. “Because we knew about people who had nice fiber, but they weren’t interested in it.”
Buying in wool for the mill to make its own yarn meant learning new skills, like wool dying, which hadn’t been part of their custom processing services. They experimented with dying in Allen’s garage and took the resulting yarn down to the Fiber Festival of New England in Massachusetts. “Neither one of us, I think, realized the response we were going to get. It was unbelievable,” says Allen. “And since then, the game just completely changed to where custom processing is now, maybe, 15 percent of our business.”
The majority of business now is designing, producing, marketing, and selling their own line of yarn, which they sell online at fiber festivals, retail at the mill, and wholesale through nearly 90 local yarn shops around the country.
There are now 10 employees (five full-time and five part-time), and rather than working on the mill floor most of the day, as they had in the beginning, Kievet and Allen can now mostly be found at their desks in the back of the mill, attending to the business parts of the business.
Steps to making yarn
When raw wool is delivered to the mill, the first step in the yarn-making process is to scour it. A series of on-demand water heaters get water up to 180 degrees. “We need that heat to break down the lanolin,” says Allen. Lanolin is a fatty secretion that helps keep the sheep warm in winter and protects their skin, but that would also seriously gum up the milling equipment if left on the wool. A combination of the water and a detergent break down the lanolin – and despite name of the process, no scrubbing is employed. “Remember, if you agitate wool, you’re going to felt it,” Allen explains. “It’s the same reason your mother always said, ‘don’t put your sweater in the washing machine.’” Instead, an oversized potato-masher tool is used to gently move around and press down the wool in the water and detergent.
After two rounds of scouring, the wool goes into a commercial Maytag washer – but only on the spin cycle, just to remove most of the water. It is then placed on racks for further drying. The wool is then dyed using the mill’s recipes. “When we’re dyeing it, we’ve got to get it up to a certain temperature, and we add citric acid and dissolve that in a combination of the citric acid and the dye and the heat – that’s what binds it to the wool,” says Allen. “That’s usually what we do the first thing in the morning; we then rinse it and hang it out to dry again.”
With demand for the mill’s yarn so strong, its need for wool has exceeded local supply, so it supplements by purchasing wool from sheep ranches in the western US. This product arrives partially processed in what are called bumps of “combed top.”
The mill floor is a mix of massive equipment dating back to the 1940s, though in pristine condition, and more modern technology. “So this is a picker,” Allen says, pointing to the next step in the process. “The fiber in it now has already been picked once; it’s going to be picked one more time, and then it will be carded – you can see how it goes into the carder and comes out as a soft rope on the other end.” When that material has been collected, it’s sent on to the pin drafter [see video below].
If you’re starting to get the idea that there are a lot of labor-intensive steps involved in milling wool, you’re right. Up next is the spinner. In addition to the one that Allen and Kievet purchased from Richmond, they’ve added a second spinner so one is devoted to making singles and the other forming two-ply yarns. “Ninety percent of what we do is two-ply yarn,” she explains.
While the product at this point looks to the untrained eye like finished yarn, the process is still not over. The material is next rinsed again in warm water “to let it bloom, because sheets have a lot of crimp – that little wiggle in the fiber,” says Allen. “This has been under tension. We want the crimp to come back to life. The crimp is really baked into the memory of the fiber, and some sheep are crimpier than others. So once we rinsed it and got that ‘puff’ back, our very last step is on our hanker, which creates a crawler, like you see it on the store shelf. And then the yarn is ready to have a label put on it.”
Building a community
Word of Junction Fiber Mill’s high quality yarn has spread quickly, not only at fiber festivals, but also online. Relying on Kievet’s professional experience in marketing and website development, along with Allen’s background in television production, the two have used social media and YouTube to spread the word about their processes and products and, in that way, have built a devoted community of fiber aficionados. “Every week, we just sort of sit down and chat about what’s going out the mill for like a half hour,” says Kievet. “It’s not a huge viewership, but they’re very dedicated, and the response is amazing – at fiber festivals people come up to us, they feel like they know us. And that’s really helped our business by giving us this platform where people can interact with us. They know what we’re up to. They learn about how yarn is made through us. I think a lot of mills like ours are very busy making the yarn, whereas we have hired folks to make most of the yarn, so Peg and I are now able to spend more time in the education and sharing the story of what we’re doing.”
As a testament to just how their reputation and community have developed, when Junction Fiber Mill announced it will be holding a fiber retreat in White River Junction in July, the 50 available spots sold out in 12 hours. “People are going to come from all over to hang out with us for a weekend, tour the mill, tour a farm, work with some fiber,” says Allen. Luckily for those who live locally, Junction Fiber Mill holds monthly open houses that provide a chance to see the mill and the fiber process in person.
Like most of the mill’s customers, Allen and Kievet are passionate knitters. So they remain very aware, as Kievet says, that “the finish line isn’t where we leave it with our product – our customers take it and they transform it, whether through mostly knitting or crocheting or weaving, into their final product.” For most, the fact that the yarn was milled in a small facility in Vermont is part of the story of those finished products.
“We cannot compete with national crafts stores, where they’re selling low-priced acrylic yarns,” says Kievet. “And that’s great if that’s what you can afford and you want to knit. Where our market is really people that want to get as deep as they possibly can [into the fiber world] without actually opening a mill.”
Being a small-batch producer also “allows us, for example, to pivot on a dime and make any new yarns that we can imagine to respond to different things in pop culture,” says Kievet. For example, with prom season coming up, the mill recently had some fun experimenting with adding a synthetic material called Angelina fiber to one batch of wool – giving it a little sparkle. And during sugaring season, it created a special Sugar on Snow yarn, combining white and amber colors and paired with maple syrup from George Miller, a sugarmaker who lives up the road from Allen. Their followers watched the wool being spun and dyed and got a chance to learn about Vermont maple at the same time. Orders came flooding in from around the country. “They followed this yarn being made from the beginning, so they were buying a piece of the story,” says Allen.
Still a bottleneck
Sheep owners from not only Vermont and New Hampshire, but also around the Northeast are sending their wool to Junction Fiber Mill for custom processing. These usually represent smaller flocks, sometimes just a handful of sheep. But with only so much capacity at Junction Fiber Mill, and with fewer fiber mills operating elsewhere these days, demand still is outpacing supply.
When it comes to buying wool for its own line, the mill is always on the lookout for high quality wool. Primarily that means clean wool. Allen, for instance, puts coats on her own personal sheep to ensure the wool when sheared is free from hay and other (less pleasant) pasture contaminants. Farms with hundreds of sheep obviously can’t jacket them all, but it helps for the mill to be involved well before shearing time to work through the details and guide the “skirting” process to be sure the resulting fibers are long enough (more than 2 inches) and as clean as possible. Allen says that visiting farms in person is one of her favorite parts of the job.
They also look to work with farms that can provide a reasonable quantity of wool. Because every sheep breed and every flock produces slightly different fiber, it takes a certain amount to make a consistent yarn. So if a farm has, for example, only 36 pounds of wool, that will produce just 85 skeins of yarn. That makes it difficult to market and could result in frustrated customers, who see the yarn being made on the weekly YouTube “Millcast,” but call only to find it’s already sold out.
Future plans
While the number of employees has grown, neither of the owners is interested in massively scaling up their mill. “We try to have people here from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m., and now we have enough people to keep the spinner spinning, and we can have a few more people working on the weekends. We’re not interested in having people here working at 2 a.m. We want to stay in our comfort zone and be able to think about what fun we want to have and what stunts we want to try and keep being creative,” says Allen. “There’s no sense trying to compete with giant mills overseas. We have our niche that’s more on the artisanal side, and that’s where we want to be.”
“It’s been fun. We’ve definitely gotten to learn more skills than we necessarily thought we would. I think Peg and I both are game for an adventure, and the mill has provided that to the extreme!” says Kievet.
– Patrick White
This is such an incredible feature. The story of Junction Fiber Mill really is a testament to all of the great things that make Vermont Vermont.