Hand Jive Knits produces natural, hand-dyed yarns including fingering weight merino and thick and thin bulky merino, as well as an organic worsted weight yarn from Columbia sheep.
I recently talked with Hand Jive's own Darlene Hayes about the eco-friendly yarn movement and how consumers can find the best yarns to suit their definition of sustainability.
About: How do you define eco-friendly when it comes to yarn?
Darlene Hayes: I define "eco-friendly" as having the fewest man-made chemicals as possible in the process of going from fiber to finished yarn. So an organic, naturally colored wool that hasn't been treated with carbonizing agents to remove bits of plant matter and that was raised and processed near me, or at least in North America, would be my ultimate.
A naturally colored organic cotton yarn grown and processed in North America would make my list, too. Not many yarns out there fit this definition, although there are some (Sally Fox's Foxfibre cottons, for example, and some of Thirteen Mile Wool's yarns). My Greensheep™ Columbia is the most eco-friendly yarn I carry.
It is hard to find local organic wool at a price that can still support a wholesale dyeing business, so I was lucky to find that one.
I don't consider bamboo, soy protein fiber, corn, milk, etc., yarns to be eco-friendly. None of those source materials have any fibers in and of themselves, so in order to make fibers from them you have to basically treat them the way you would rayon. I don't know the specifics of most of the processes since they are mostly trade secrets, and I think the yarns are basically fine (except Ingeo, which I really don't care for), but to me they are only eco-friendly if you are comparing them to yarns made from petroleum products or nylon.
About: How is your yarn production process less stressful to the environment than the conventional ways of doing things?
DH: Well, it is smaller, for one thing. My "dye studio" is basically the dog run at the side of my house. And I use raw plant materials like onion skins and dill weed. Once I've extracted the color from the dyestuff, it goes into my compost pile.
I use a couple of chemical mordants to vary colors -- mostly alum (food-grade and used in making pickles, among other things), cream of tartar (made from grapes, the same stuff you use to make beaten egg whites fluffier), a little iron (from a compound commonly used to treat anemia in people and sometimes as a fertilizer supplement) and sometimes a little copper (from the compound used to prevent peach leaf curl in organic orchards).
The amounts are minuscule -- I use some of the leftover alum water on my blueberry bushes to give them the acid environment and minerals that they love since our water here is so alkaline, for example.
About: Do you think it's important for people to consider where their yarn comes from and what it's made of? Why?
DH: Well, I think it is important for people to consider where everything they buy comes from. Why? Well, there we get into "Master's Thesis" territory again, but I guess I can just say that all of our decisions have an impact on the world around us, and it is a good thing to at least consider the impact that any particular decision will have. No decision is perfect -- everything is a balance, but there is value to at least considering the question.
About: Are you seeing more demand for eco-friendly yarns than in the past, or more customers asking where your yarn comes from and how it's produced?
DH: I haven't been in business all that long (five years or so, but I've been deliberately growing slowly), so I don't really have any comparison to the past. Certainly being "green" is getting more attention from all sorts of quarters. I have noticed that at the wholesale level more and more companies are jumping on the green bandwagon.
Some of it is genuine -- some is marketing, but it does indicate to me that there is either more interest from the consumer. I do get a fair amount of questions about where my yarn comes from and how it is produced, but then again, many of the people that are asking those questions have come to me because they are seeking a particular ethic in their fiber choices.
About: Where do you see this genre of the yarn production business going in the future?
DH: It seems to be in growth mode, at least for the time being. It is always hard to know if the popularity of "eco-friendly" will go the way of eyelash yarns, but I hope that we see a real return to natural fibers in natural or plant-dyed colors. La Lana Wools has been doing it for....at least 30 years, so that's encouraging.
