A review by cozycactus
Vanishing Fleece: Adventures in American Wool by Clara Parkes

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.