From Fleece to Fabulous: Taking It to the Limit
Beth Smith shows us how childhood knitting opened the door to fiber art
For decades I’ve watched my friend Beth Smith’s nimble fingers pick up a board game piece, move it, and ruin my day. Yet only recently have I discovered the full panoply of amazing things those fingers and that mind can do — all within the world of fiber.
Beth’s from Holland, Michigan. I spent ten years in Michigan’s lower peninsula getting overeducated, two of those in frosty Grand Rapids, not far from Holland. I came to appreciate the region’s unisex wardrobe of wooly hat and scarf, corduroy pants, flannel shirt, and boots. Hand-knit hats and scarves are cherished.
Like many women, Beth learned to knit in childhood. One summer, while her parents were absorbed by graduate school, her grandmother stepped in as babysitter. Beth was six and her sisters four and eight. Her grandmother gave each girl a wooden spool with nails driven in one end and taught them to knit on it. She showed them how to loop yarn over the nail heads and make a knit tube snake out the bottom of the spool. Beth’s grandmother then showed the trio how to coil the tubes, sew them together, and make mats.
Beth went on to quilt, knit, and crochet with needles. She whipped up clothes for her doll and, by high school, could knit a stocking cap. Impressed a friend’s speed with the continental method of holding the yarn and needles, she switched over. “Show me that. It was like a light bulb went off…so much faster!” In a college summer job at Mackinac Island, she watched as a coworker knit a Fair Isle sweater. She then taught herself to do that as well as cable knitting.
Beth studied political science at Hope College in her hometown. Mahatma Gandhi, the champion of nonviolent resistance in India’s quest for independence, would be an expected topic in her classes, but given the conservative bent to the region, maybe not. Either way, Beth certainly could not have anticipated winding up as Gandhi did — sitting at a simple spinning wheel, making her own yarn. Yet that is what happened. For Gandhi, the wheel symbolized self-reliance, the ability of his people to make their own clothing, to no longer need Great Britain in their lives. For Beth, spinning is a simple pleasure.
For years, her fiber work was limited to knitting little scarves, an occasional hat or a sweater for her daughter, a baby blanket tucked away for any upcoming shower. Then she checked out a fiber fair at her community center in northern Virginia. Spinning spoke to her, but spinning wheels were beyond her budget. A classic wooden spinning wheel touted as “the most popular in the world” today sells for a single penny shy of eight hundred dollars.
Folks at the fair suggested she start small. She could spin her own yarn using a simple drop spindle. In fact, they had one for sale for a mere twenty-five dollars. Beth was five dollars short. Intrigued and determined, she went home and did some online research. A do-it-yourself drop spindle could be made from a dowel, two compact discs, and a cupholder. Beth created her own drop spindle at a negligible cost and she went to town, spinning away. She used it for two years, then bought a seventeen dollar drop spindle. Even today, she likes the homemade one best. For five to six years, she was content with drop spindle spinning. She knitted up her handspun sport weight yarn into four or five shawls, three sweaters, four scarves, and a hat.
Then Beth went to another fiber fair. She saw a low-cost spinning wheel made of PVC and a recycled wheelchair wheel. She was hooked. Babes Fiber Garden, a Wisconsin manufacturing company, makes spinning wheels and other fiber equipment from low cost materials. For a few hundred dollars, Beth bought herself a Babes wheel. “It is very basic,” says Beth, “with three different size bobbins. It’s held up well.” She finds it easy to take apart and clean.
Over the years, my friend has expanded her fiber skills. Self-taught, she’s learned from others, by observation, and through online research including watching videos. Only recently did she buy her first knitting book. Nowadays Beth can start with a raw fleece and take it all the way to a personally designed handknit item.
Getting from sheep to sweater, alpaca to afghan, camel to coat has as many potential moves as a chess game. As befits an activity practiced for millennia, a rich language has evolved to describe all the ways animal hair is manipulated. Beth has become fluent in fiber speak and readily talks about scouring, batts, roving, twists, noddies, and skeins.
No matter how it’s described, the steps are basically the same. The fiber is picked clean of obvious foreign material (burrs, bits of hay, and what-have-you), washed, dried, the fibers lined up, and spun into yarn. It’s dyed either after the washing step or after it’s spun.
Beth likes to keep “everything very simple and basic.” While avid spinners talk about Irish tension, Scotch tension, double tension, and spin ratios, Beth just spins her fiber the way she likes it. She focuses on function and is frugal when “it doesn’t make a difference.” Initially she hand carded with her grandmother’s antique paddles from the Netherlands. When these proved too fragile, she bought a pair of Ashford paddles. Rather than purchase a twenty-dollar, fancy wood diz (a tool used to pull fibers into alignment), Beth used a metal washer.
A college-ruled notebook, fat with taped-in and glued-in samples of yarn, records in detail Beth’s exploration of fibers, dyes, and patterns. Sketches of sweaters, fiber blends, dated entries of dye processes, and warnings based on unanticipated consequences fill it.
She is open to any fiber, natural as well as synthetic. This has led to some adventures. At one point, Beth visited a farm out in the Shenandoah Valley, near Berryville, which kept nine camels, Jacob sheep, Welsh sheep, a kangaroo, and porcupines. Intrigued, she bought two bags of camel “sheds.” She dove in and began processing it before she discovered she should have separated the prickly guard hairs from the softer fiber. She then spent four months pulling out the guard hairs from the softer ones. Eventually, she spun eight skeins of soft, brown camel wool. It is still in skeins. After all that work, “It has to be used for something special” and she hasn’t figured out the best project for it yet.
Also set aside for the future is a precious two-pound gift of Blue Faced Leicester wool, a gift from one of her sisters. Known as BFL among spinners, the Blue Faced Leicester sheep’s long and curly wool is exceptional and known for its lustrous softness.
“If you spin, you have stashes of wool — just like people who sew have their fabric stashes.”
In another adventure, she wanted “real wool.” She bought four pounds of mohair from Washington state. The goat hair arrived “full of green alfalfa, filthy brown.” Gamely she picked it, soaked it, skimmed off the debris, soaked it again, washed it. She was rewarded with a beautiful snowy white fiber which she combined with turquoise and raspberry pink to make a sweater.
Recently, Beth has tackled wool from Jacob sheep. This ancient breed, because of its unique appearance, was kept by England’s landed gentry as ornamental park animals. They are piebald and typically have four, and even six, horns sprouting from their noggins. While Beth liked the silkiness of the long white sections to her Jacob fleece, she didn’t spin all the brown wool as it was “like Velcro,” “only two inches long, coarse, and cut my fingers when I spun.”
Sometimes she is inspired to add a bit of sparkle to her work and spins synthetic nylon and tinsel into her yarn. She has worked with rami, silk, blends, and cotton. She “hated” the cotton with its short quarter-inch staple as she prefers working with a longer fiber. However, she saves the cotton plugs from prescription medicine bottles in a large Ziplock bag in anticipation of trying cotton once again in the future.
Beth uses natural, often food-grade, dyes to color her yarn. She’s brewed up dye from buttercups she gathered and is looking forward to experimenting with indigo.
Once her yarn is spun and dyed, Beth settles on a project. “…clean, card, spin, find the right pattern, then you make something beautiful.” She is bold and talks easily of adding ruffles, ripping out parts, changing sleeves. She points out that seamstresses alter patterns routinely and knitters can do the same.
Conceptually, Beth Smith encourages knitters to look at a pattern as an outline, a framework, which can be filled in with any desired combination of stitches and features. “Use any stitch you want.”
Giggling, she mentions a knit shop owner who was flummoxed by a customer. Seeing an illustrated pattern she liked, the customer asked, “I like this pattern, but do you have it in blue?”
“I’ve never been that way,” Beth confides.
As for tips for others, she says, “If you don’t like something, tear it out and do it over. It’s over. Took me years and years and years to learn that. Don’t be complacent with ‘it’s alright.’ “ She has knit a sweater, kept it for a year, decided she hated it, then tore it apart. “Frogged it!” She will remake things, reuse the yarn, add new yarn, and is clearly open to do-overs.
She has arrived at a high level with her fiber art. She has the skill and experience to express her feelings. Her Sunshine yarn, for instance, is based on a sunrise this past January. ‘Such a beautiful sunrise! I want to make a yarn like that.’ ” The result is a vibrant yarn of peach tones, white, yellow — a mix of hand spun and purchased — with a touch of sparkle for good measure.
Beth’s work is, by definition, priceless, as no amount of money can purchase it. She only creates for her family, her friends, and herself. A wedding shawl for her daughter. An alpaca blend shawl in her favorite colors for her sister to wear as she teaches school. When asked about monetizing her hobby, she says, “No. It would take all the joy out of it.”
What began one summer in Michigan as a way to entertain three little girls opened the door for a lifetime of creativity.
Maybe it’s time to think about the possibilities in all our hobbies and pastimes, to ponder what we can give others through them — not only by what objects or experiences we might create for our loved ones but also by what skills and attitudes we can share, impart, pass on — all the benefits of time well spent.