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ingamama1033's review
adventurous
emotional
informative
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
Fellow fiber heads and thread bangers will find this to be a necessary read if your medium is wool. Actually there is also tangential commentary on the hardly existent American textile industry and the difficulty in sourcing earth and climate friendly textiles. Clara Parkes takes a 600+ pound bale of raw wool around the country to process it into yarn.
jolowry's review against another edition
adventurous
funny
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
relaxing
medium-paced
5.0
secondhandreads's review
informative
inspiring
sad
medium-paced
5.0
One of the few books I've read that left me misty eyed. If you care for the textile industry and the impact it has on our planet and culture this book is a must-read. The destruction of American textile production in favor of cheaper, easier, more dangerous alternatives is genuinely heartbreaking. The hope is in the people trying to rebuild what we lost, and build it back better.
cozycactus's review against another edition
3.0
Vanishing Fleece takes readers on a journey from sheep to yarn. Four times with four different sets of machinery. The tone is lighthearted and feels like it'd be more at home in a fiction novel, so it ought to be an easy read, right? Wrong. The machinery was described in detail and all of those details get jumbled together until it's metaphorical felt.
The carding machine is made up of many, many cylinders, each coated with fine wire teeth rather like industrial-grade cat brushes. Each cylinder is a different size and rotates at a different speed in such a way that the fibers are constantly pulled from one cylinder to the next to the next. The wool enters as clumpy pillow fluff and emerges as a diaphanous sheet of fibers....
Had labelled pictures or diagrams been included, or if a more technical tone was used to explain the machinery, following the process would've been much simpler. I recommend searching for the pictures online while reading. That said, the state of the industry at the time of writing versus what it was in wool's hay day is poignant.
Business was so good, they bought their competitor and swelled to five hundred employees.... Then NAFTA was enacted..... Kraemer ultimately whittled staff down to forty.
If you're a yarn consumer, this is a moderately interesting read.
rosysoprano's review against another edition
hopeful
informative
inspiring
lighthearted
reflective
relaxing
slow-paced
5.0
A super fun read, especially as a knitter!