Hair of the Dog
I wasn’t planning to write about dogs again, at least not so soon, but it was really fun writing about teaching a dog to weave last time. And I know not everyone out there is a dog person, but enough of you are that I got a lot of great responses.
And when a member of my local weaving guild sent out a link to a wonderful story about the raising, spinning and weaving of dog hair by indigenous peoples in the Pacific Northwest, I thought it would be nice to pass it on to those of you who would like to read it.
The Dogs That Grew Wool and the People Who Love Them
My own experience in working with dog hair is limited, but still rather significant for me. When I met my former husband in college he had a dog named Sam who was quite a character and very much a free spirit. It took a while for Sam to accept me into the family because he definitely liked men more than women, but eventually he learned to trust me and ultimately we became just as bonded as if we had always been together.
In the last few years of Sam’s life I started collecting his hair until I had enough of it to spin. It wasn’t strong enough to hold together on its own, so I mixed it together with black wool and made a 2-ply yarn with it. I had become entranced with Kaffe Fassett’s ‘Glorious Knits’ book and knitted a veritable coat of many colors in one of his patterns for my ex. Mixed amongst all the other commercial and handspun yarns were special sections of Sam hair that stood out because of their fluffiness. I don’t have a photo of the sweater that I knit, but this one from the book gives a pretty good idea of what it looked like -
Our dog Ella Bella came to us as a 2 year-old rescue, so her heritage was unknown. The papers that came with her speculated that she might be a golden Sheltie, possibly with a bit of wolf mixed in. A few months ago we decided to get her DNA tested and find out what she really was made of. Much to our surprise it turned out that half of her was a mix of husky and malamute, with the other half being a mix of this and that and the other thing.
A couple weeks ago, just after I wrote my last blog post, we had our biggest snowfall of the season. I was able to get out on my cross-country skis around the neighborhood, and Ella’s sled dog heritage came out strong. She was perfectly happy to spend hours lying in the snow in our yard, and loved to dig her nose into the snowbanks when we went out on our walks.
If you read my last blog post you met Rosie the sheepdog, who put a smile on my face every time I looked up at the camera in my last online course for Interweave. Rosie’s mom, Janet, was tickled pink to find Rosie featured in my post. She updated me with news of Rosie and said that she came home from her weekly doggy day care date completely spent after playing in the snow all day with the other dogs.
I know just how she feels!