I made a sweater from scratch (it made me insane)

I spent my entire summer last year going from sheep to sweater. Like, I started in May by shearing a sheep, and by September, I had a fully finished sweater. I took a raw sheep fleece, washed it in my bathtub, brushed it all out, spun it into yarn, dyed it with homemade natural dyes, and then learned to knit and knit it into a sweater. This is that sweater. And honestly, it kind of sucks because this was my first time doing any of this. People keep asking me why I did this. Why did I dedicate all of my free time for 4 months to this project?

It's because I think that we are so separated from the way that things are made that we are incapable of actually appreciating them. So, this is my way of reconnecting with the way that things are made for my own curiosity and to share with all of you. By the end of this, you'll see every step it takes to create a sweater truly from scratch. I hope you come away from this appreciating all clothing more because there is no such thing as a sewing machine that operates itself. All clothing is handmade. This sweater was just a little extra handmade.

All right, folks. We have Franny. This is Franny. Say hi to Franny. The wool I used for this project came from a New York City sheep. I went to the last working farm in New York City, the Queens County Farm Museum, and met Franny. Hi, Franny. Shearing is a really difficult job. It takes a lot of skill and finesse that I don't have, which is why it's the one step that I did not do for myself. Yay, Franny. Look at all those spots.

Wool is an amazing natural fiber made even better by about 11,000 years of humans breeding sheep to our liking. Modern wool is a technology. All fibers and fabric are. These are tools that we created to expand the climates that we were able to live in, to signal status, to acknowledge social groups. As Virginia Postrel puts it in her amazing book, The Fabric of Civilization. We hairless apes co-evolved with our cloth. One of the best examples of human interference in sheep is the merino. When you hear merino, that's the breed of sheep. My sheep, Franny, is a Merino. Merino sheep came from Spain in the 12th century. They were bred for very fine, soft wool, and they were so much better than other sheep at the time that if the Spanish government found you trying to export one, it was punishable by death. Me and my sweater. And with that,

I had acquired 4 lb of raw sheep fleece for $48. This scared me. If you've ever knit before, you know that enough wool yarn to make a sweater normally costs hundreds of dollars. Which means the expensive cost of yarn must come from the difficult labor. The labor that I was about to do.

Today's the day my wool washing soap came in. This is Unicorn Power Scour. This is what all the women online recommend. And I'm very scared because if I mess this up, the wool will turn into felt. Quick note, felt is made when you agitate wool and the fibers interlock and shrink down. It's why you can't wash wool sweaters. When they shrink, that's felting. It smells like a petting zoo. So, okay, this is where right now what I'm doing is called scouring. And when you're scouring, you're supposed to separate off the dirtiest pieces already. And so, I'm wondering I'm feeling like Yeah. Okay, so that's poop. So, okay. I'm going to be honest with you. I don't really think about the things I do before I do them. Once I find myself 10 miles in to a 500 mile walk or deep in the Canadian wilderness in a canoe, then and only then do I realize what I've signed myself up for. This was that moment for this project. Okay, now with my gloves on, um, this will be easier. So, obviously I'm doing this the very the very at home DIY way.

On an industrial scale, like a wool sweater that you would buy would not have been hand scoured. There are like wool mills that have um machinery and stuff that helps automate this. And now I have my bag of wool and I have very hot water in that tub. And now I'm going to dunk this in there and leave it to sit for like 30 minutes. Also, just to acknowledge it, I'm wearing a Meta shirt. I wish I had thought to put on a different shirt. I got it a few years ago when I was covering their developers conference for work and it's the thing in my closet that I'm most willing to get sheep poop on. You would not believe how immediately this water is a dark dark brown. Oh wow. Wow. What a color. Okay, so because the oil is filled with lanolin, you're really not supposed to dump it down your drain because that's just like oily fatty stuff.

But because I rent this apartment, I don't really care like the most about that. So, uh-oh. Did you just dump a bunch of dirty, oily sheep fleece down your bathtub drain because you're a renter and you thought the consequences of that would take years to manifest? Does your bathtub take 45 minutes to drain now and look like this when it does? You need Pequa. Pequa is the number one drain cleaner of choice for Okay, I'm not going to do a whole fake ad, but Pequa really is the only thing that worked. Um,

today what I'm doing is called picking. I go like this and stuff falls out. This step was really hard because I didn't know how perfectly I needed to get it clean. Did I need to get every single piece of grass out or would some fell out in later steps? I didn't know. Franny never considered how much work she was creating for me every time she rolled around in the grass.

Okay, so just the first bag, just the picking of the first bag ended up taking two hours. This does not bode well for the amount of time I still have to spend doing this. This is all the dirt and the tangled wool that came out of just the the one bag. It is Wednesday night. I'm spinning this into yarn on Friday for real this time. Not changing the date again. I am carding it, which is where I prep it to be spun. I use two little paddles and I brush it between them. It gets all the fibers going in the same direction and then it can be spun into yarn. I've since learned that this is the hardest way to do it by hand. There are tools like a carding drum or a diz that help it go much faster and have a much more uniform end product. The way I did it is just more old school and more difficult. I finally finished my first big bag of wool. That's a win for tonight. It is 2:30 in the morning. Um, and I do have to go to work tomorrow. One must imagine Sisyphus is happy cleaning wool.

Did you know that humans have been making string for 120,000 years? Some early string fragments weren't even made by anatomically modern humans. Now you know. Of all the steps in this process, spinning yarn truly made me feel connected to every woman who has ever lived. This is women's work. It always has been. Spinning yarn has always been a chore, but at least a mobile chore. Women could take their drop spindles out to chat with the neighbors or work on another household job. Up until about the industrial revolution, most women would just need to kind of constantly be spinning yarn to make enough fabric for their family's needs and maybe to sell outside the home. In the industrial revolution, machinery made spinning much faster. James Hargreaves mounted eight spindles on a frame and turned them all with one wheel, thus spinning eight threads at once. But it still required a lot of human labor. Women who were good spinners could make enough money to support themselves, which of course made men so jealous they made the term spinsters a derogatory term. For my spinning, I didn't even use the slowest method, which would have been a drop spindle. I used a spinning wheel and a nice modern one at that. And this still took forever. Oh, doesn't it smell nice? It smells kind of like a sheep. No more animal smell. Yeah. Oh, you did good job. Thank you. This is Yukako. She runs a fiber arts studio called Loop of the Loom in Brooklyn. Right. So, yarn should be long and strong enough to do something. But this one is still fl

you can't wash wool sweaters. When they shrink, that's felting. It smells like a petting zoo. So, okay, this is where right now what I'm doing is called scouring. And when you're scouring, you're supposed to separate off the dirtiest pieces already. And so, I'm wondering I'm

feeling like Yeah. Okay, so that's poop. So, okay. I'm going to be honest with you. I don't really think about the things I do before I do them. Once I find myself 10 miles in to a 500 mile walk or deep in the Canadian wilderness in a canoe, then and only then do I realize what

I've signed myself up for. This was that moment for this project. Okay, now with my gloves on, um, this will be easier. So, obviously I'm doing this the very the very at home DIY way.

On an industrial scale, like a a wool sweater that you would buy would not have been hand scoured. There are like wool mills that have um machinery and stuff that helps automate this. And now I have my bag of wool and I have very hot water in that tub. And now I'm going

to dunk this in there and leave it to sit for like 30 minutes. Also, just to acknowledge it, I'm wearing a Meta shirt. I wish I had thought to put on a different shirt. I got it a few years ago

when I was covering their developers conference for work and it's the thing in my closet that I'm most willing to get sheep poop on. You would not believe how immediately this water is a dark dark brown. Oh wow. Wow. What a color. Okay, so because the oil is filled with lanolin,

you're really not supposed to dump it down your drain because that's just like oily fatty stuff.

But because I rent this apartment, I don't really care like the most about that. So, uh-oh. Did you just dump a bunch of dirty, oily sheep fleece down your bathtub drain because you're a renter and you thought the consequences of that would take years

to manifest? Does your bathtub take 45 minutes to drain now and look like this when it does? You need Pequa. Pequa is the number one drain cleaner of choice for Okay, I'm not going to do a whole fake ad, but Pequa really is the only thing that worked. Um,

today what I'm doing is called picking. I go like this and stuff falls out. This step was really hard because I didn't know how perfectly I needed to get it clean. Did I need to get every single piece of grass out or would some fell out in later steps? I didn't know. Franny never

considered how much work she was creating for me every time she rolled around in the grass.

Okay, so just the first bag, just the picking of the first bag ended up taking two hours. This does not bode well for the amount of time I still have to spend doing this. This is all the dirt and the

tangled wool that came out of just the the one bag. It is Wednesday night. I'm spinning this into yarn on Friday for real this time. Not changing the date again. I am carding it, which is where I prep it to be spun. I use two little paddles and I brush it between them. It gets all the fibers

going in the same direction and then it can be spun into yarn. I've since learned that this is the hardest way to do it by hand. There are tools like a carting drum or a diz that help it go much

faster and have a much more uniform end product. The way I did it is just more old school and more difficult. I finally finished my first big bag of wool. That's a win for tonight. It is 2:30 in the

morning. Um, and I do have to go to work tomorrow. One must imagine Sisyphus is happy cleaning wool.

Did you know that humans have been making string for 120,000 years? Some early string fragments weren't even made by anatomically modern humans. Now you know. Of all the steps in this process, spinning yarn truly made me feel connected to every woman who has ever lived. This is women's

work. It always has been. Spinning yarn has always been a chore, but at least a mobile chore. Women could take their drop spindles out to chat with the neighbors or work on another household job.

Up until about the industrial revolution, most women would just need to kind of constantly be spinning yarn to make enough fabric for their family's needs. and maybe to sell outside the home. In the industrial revolution, machinery made spinning much faster. James Hargreaves

mounted eight spindles on a frame and turned them all with one wheel, thus spinning eight threads at once. But it still required a lot of human labor. Women who were good spinners could make enough money to support themselves, which of course made men so jealous they made the term

spinsters a derogatory term. For my spinning, I didn't even use the slowest method, which would have been a drop spindle. I used a spinning wheel and a nice modern one at that. And this still took forever. Oh, doesn't it smell nice? It smells kind of like a sheep. No more animal smell. Yeah. Oh,

you did good job. Thank you. This is Yukako. She runs a fiber arts studio called Loop of the Loom in Brooklyn. Right. So, yarn should be long and strong enough to do something. But this one is still fluffy and short fiber. Mhm. So, we're going to make longer and then stronger. Okay. Okay. So,

the practice a little bit so you can pick the fiber. Yukako was teaching me drafting a technique that pulls the right amount of fiber to the right length for spinning. Mine is really chunky. [laughter] Yours is really nice, but you can control. You can control later. Okay. So,

don't worry about now that unevenness. Well, how long have you been doing this? uh maybe 20 years.

So I've been doing this for like five minutes. So yeah. Yeah. Now that I had the basics of drafting, I could start on the spinning wheel. So I'm drafting as I go. Yeah. Okay. Look, I block now.

So it's completely spin now. And then this finger move back. Got it. And move back. Spinning wheels can vary a bit, but basically work like this. When you press the foot pedals, the wheel begins to spin. As it spins, it pulls the fiber into the machine and causes it to twist. With your hands,

you have to work against these forces to make sure it doesn't get pulled into the machine too fast or twist too much. As you can imagine, it's a lot to keep up with, especially on your first try. Wait wait wait. Ah. Look how little yarn I've made so far. [laughter] Oop. Ope. Oops Ah,

yeah. Wow. I'm making the knitting part really hard for myself if I don't spin the yarn well. Yukako you are a very patient teacher. [laughter] Thank you. Because everybody can do it.

That's why I have patience. I got the basics down and was finally good enough to spin while having a conversation, which was historically the best part of spinning. Does it feel cool to get to work in something that's like so historical that like people have been doing for for thousands of

years? Yeah. So I believe this one you know the set in our gen DNA. So the um the cell tell us it's a joy. So that's why even this the patient and struggling with the work it became we feel we

feel joy. The textile is our life. Without this, we cannot live, right? Finally, I'd made two full bobbins of single ply yarn, and it was time to combine them together. Each of these are spun with the wheel moving clockwise, and then they're twisted together, spinning counterclockwise. This

locks in the twist and makes the strongest yarn. Beautiful. Look at this. Cool. Now, to keep it from getting tangled, I wind it into a hank using the most Seuss-icle device in all of knitting, the niddy- noddy. So after two and a half hours, I had made one small ball of yarn.

Not a great pace. Many more days of spinning at the studio followed. This was super difficult because I had to make time to get over there and I could only make progress during the hours that they were open. On July 2nd, while I was spinning, Yukako mentioned that she was planning workshops

for an event called New York Textile Month. And for some reason, I felt confident enough in the current state of my project that I thought I should have an event during New York Textile Month where I do an exhibition of this project. An interesting decision looking back on it. But

now this project had a deadline. Short 2 and a half hour shift today. We got one skein done.

Um I just I I couldn't stay any longer. I can't lock in for that long. I felt like this was taking forever. And then I made myself feel worse by looking up how yarn is spun industrially. It's so

fast. It's so uniform. But then I remembered that I'm participating in a long lineage of spinners taking their sweet time. In her amazing book, The Fabric of Civilization, Virginia Postrel says that making a Viking ship's sail would take longer than making the actual ship. Prepping the wool

to be spun would take 600 days. And then to spin enough yarn to make a 100 square meter sailcloth, you would need 60 miles of yarn, which would take 385 days of spinning. But this is the craziest stat she gives. In the early 11th century, King Canute's North Sea empire maintained a fleet

with about a million square meters of sail cloth. For the spinning alone, that much material would require the equivalent of 10,000 work years. Huge milestone. I just finished my first bag of wool, which means I am halfway done spinning, which is really exciting. Three skeins done. That's crazy.

I think I might have enough to make my sweater now. I'm going to go home and see how much I have total in grams. Really exciting times. We're back on to steps that we can do at home. Today,

I'm doing something called setting the yarn. I will put this into water for like 20 minutes and then I will let it dry and it getting wet and then drying back out will let the fibers kind of stretch and even out so that the um super tightly twisted parts can kind of loosen up

a bit. I need to show you how dirty the water just got immediately. Is this yarn still nasty?

So, you're telling me that my laziness in earlier steps has consequences that affect the current step??

That's really bad news. Okay, round two is fully submerged. Round one is drying. We do have to do three rounds. I don't know that I'm going to do them all tonight, but it's a it's a good start.

Look, I've said it once, I'll say it again. Never let your Manhattan apartment stop you from being the pioneer woman.

I dyed all of my yarn for this project using cochineal. It's a natural dye made from crushed dried beetles native to North and South America that live on cacti. Today, you might know cochineal as Carmine Red, the only FDA approved food and cosmetic dye made from bugs.

You've almost certainly eaten it before. Here are just some examples of food that's dyed with carmine red. It was one of the most popular dyes in Europe for centuries because it can make a very vibrant red that doesn't fade in sunlight or with washing. It was also much more pleasant to make

than a lot of popular colors at the time. Like Tyrian purple, for example, you made by collecting thousands of snails, smashing them open, and boiling them in urine. Yuck. If spinning yarn is the step that made me feel most connected to historical women forced to make clothing,

dyeing is the step that made me think most of modern garment workers. Dyes are one of the most dangerous steps in the garment manufacturing industry today. Many of the dyes used are harsh chemicals and known carcinogens. Not only do these dyes harm the garment workers using them directly,

but dyeing fabric also uses so much water, and that polluted water then runs off into the communities surrounding factories. The first step of the dye process is called mordanting, which helps the dye soak into the fibers and not fade. This is one way that even natural dyes

aren't always as gentle as they might seem. Alum, the chemical I'm using for this, is very harsh.

But without it, the dye might just fade right out of my yarn. The problem is really just getting this much water heated up. That's that's the most difficult part. I should probably watch this pot so it boils faster. It's time for the yarn to go in. It's so Everything feels so scary to do.

Um, okay. People think I don't know how to cook, and it's like, oh yeah, if I didn't know how to cook, would I know how to make yarn soup? Okay, I just ran down here because I could smell the yarn cooking, which felt wrong. And it was wrong.

It was boiling. It's not supposed to boil. Um, it smells crazy. It's like, what if you created the smell of like wet dog/petting zoo and then turned that into steam that filled up your house?

Right when I was starting the dye process, I dropped a salsa that exploded all over my kitchen, which is not really relevant to the sweater, but just give you an idea of my headspace. It is what it is. Okay, the second batch of yarn is still mordanting, which means right now it's time to

get my cochineal ready. Um, I have about half of what I need in powdered form and I have another half right here that I have to grind up. I have been dreading doing this because they smell like death already and I've heard that it only gets worse as you start grinding them up.

Cochineal is also super sensitive to iron. So I had to buy kitchenware that had no iron in it or else it would turn firetruck red, which historically is what they liked it for, but I did not want. Another example of natural dyes not always being perfectly

safe. Even though cochineal is food safe, you are not supposed to breathe in the particles because they're too small. I didn't know that. I was not taking the proper safety precautions. Live and learn. Oh, okay. Let me let me give you some notes. It's

very earthy. There is sort of like an irony kind of like blood. There's like a staleness to it.

Then I did a second batch and let them both sit in their dye bath overnight. I have learned that that was a mistake and it led to the most drawn out, difficult rinsing process ever. How much do we think this stains a bathtub? Probably a lot.

I thought this would take three or four rounds of rinsing to finish and it took like 35. This was also another moment where I had to be very careful not to agitate the yarn too much or switch the water temperature because it would turn to felt. Should I be letting

it sit in the water for longer? Does that help it? or because this water then has dye in it, does that not really get more out? How does anything work? Nothing online was helpful at all. Everything just said to rinse it like twice, which was clearly not relevant in my case. Okay,

went to get a smoothie, put my my dye clothes back on. I swear I have normal clothes. I feel like in this whole video I'll be wearing this outfit, but this is just because this is safe to get stained.

The good news is, even though this is truly taking an eternity, I do really like the color. And that is the most important thing of all because if I had to spend all this time doing this and I didn't like how the color turned out, I would be miserable. Um, I would quit. This had already

taken 3 hours and I was leaving for a work trip to Houston that afternoon. So, I just needed this to be done. So, now I started a method where I just kept the tap running and continuously squeezed out the water. But, this has got to be close. I mean, that's getting really clear. Okay,

I'm done rinsing the yarn. For better or for worse, that is the amount of rinsed the yarn will be. Uh, maybe it'll bleed every time I wear it and stain all my other clothes. Such is life.

I truly can't do this for another second. Um, I need to move on. Look at that. That's so pretty.

It looks so good. [music] Once I got to knitting, I felt like the hard part was over. That was kind of the major theme of the project. Every step I finished, I go, "That must have been the hard part." The extra funny thing to remember is that this is my first ever knitting project. So,

I had to learn to knit with this weird chunky yarn. Okay, ignore the spa music. Um, I've done like two rows, but then now I'm convinced that when I joined the rows, I twisted it. So, I am going to frog this and start over for hopefully the last time. And then I didn't

make any progress for a month. You see, on that work trip to Houston, turns out I got bed bugs, which I didn't realize until I got back from [music] the vacation that I had right after.

That was the most time consuming, stressful, expensive thing I've ever dealt with. I kept all of my yarn carefully sealed away during that time. But it was the worst and funniest thing that could have happened to me in the middle of this project,

and it set me back by an entire month. And as if that wasn't bad enough, I realized that I didn't have enough yarn for the sweater. Fine, I'll go back and spin more yarn. Except I didn't have any wool that was ready to be spun. I didn't even have any wool

that was picked or carded. So I would have to go back almost to the very beginning of the project, start again, and make more yarn. It was really tough for morale.

Um, we are now less than a month until the exhibition, which means the sweater needs to be done. Uh, sooner than that, this is currently what the sweater looks like. This is the whole, this is the whole thing. It's sort of just the neck part. It's frustrating to backtrack in the process.

Two skeins done today. I was able to spin all of the wool that I brought with me. So, feeling really productive. And I think I think I don't have to spend any more yarn. "My mother told me once that she had her talk with God whenever she started a new sweater. Please don't take me

in the middle of the sweater. And as soon as she finished knitting a sweater, she already had the wool to start the next sweater so that nothing bad would happen." T minus 2 weeks until the sweater exhibition. Here's where we are. Uh, and would you believe I have to go spin more yarn tomorrow

because I ran out of this undyed yarn and I have to do this stripe. If you told me in May that I'd still be carding wool in September, I never would have started this. I'm not even kidding. Um,

I never would have thought that I had to card this much wool. I used all the cleanest wool first. So now when I have to spin more, I have to clean now this really dirty wool. Okay, I was

just using my wire carding brushes to brush out a bunch of wool and it's official. I have put blood, sweat, and tears into this. I stabbed myself with the wire brush. Two more big skeins tonight and that should hopefully be actually the last of it this time. I'm so hungover right now.

I went out last night and I did not wet set my yarn when I got home like an idiot. That's what I was supposed to do when I got home. Awesome time to be in my um 'cerveza is the answer' shirt. But uh here's here's the yarn. It turns out all

of that like cutting corners that I did in the early steps and like that is still this yarn, you know? So every time I cut corners, that's that's this stuff isn't as good as it would have been. So there's still dirt in the sink after the third rinse. So the moral of the

story is when you're doing a gigantic multi-step project, the better you do in the early phases, the happier you'll be the whole time. Now I'm knitting and it's raining on my skylight and it's the best sound. So nice. I also just finished my stripe on the body and I'm back to pink.

This is so crazy. It's like a sweater that's on that's on my body. Working with yarn like this is so crazy because now I'm supposed to pick up the five stitches that are here. And I'm like, how am I supposed to see where those five stitches are? This is Whoever spun this

yarn did it just terribly. Okay, it's very scary times and we have to assess the situation. I was working on the first sleeve and realized that I had way less yarn than I thought I did. This, for the uninitiated, is called yarn chicken. It's the worst game in the

world. You just knit as fast as you can and hope you don't run out of yarn.

One week until the exhibition. This is what we're looking like. She's beautiful. Except I do have to go spin more yarn.

Every time I do this, I look more and more exhausted I think. Two skeins, one skein, one mini skein. Uh that's got to be the last time I spin. There's no more time.

We're a week out from the exhibition. And I'm doing photos with the sheep on Monday and I'm out of town until then. Do you want to see something really crazy?

Tomorrow is the day that the sweater has to be done and I'm doing photos with the sheep. Here's where we're at. Body done, fully casted off. And then I have that much pink left for each of them. Okay. Body and one sleeve fully casted off. Um t minus

like 16 hours until I'm taking photos with the sheep in the finished sweater. Very exciting.

And then honestly kind of suddenly it was done. The project that I had spent four months on was finished. It was a sweater that I could wear and take back to show the sheep that it came from. And the sheep honestly didn't like my vibe at all. But I tried to brush that off.

Okay. Four months ago, I watched that sheep be sheared and now I have this sweater. This is so crazy. People ask me why I did this. What made me think to do a project like this? This is why I do

it. Because 200 people could come together to see and feel and smell these fibers that they wear but aren't familiar with. To see work they benefit from but maybe haven't thought about.

To hopefully be inspired to make something with their hands. My job, as I see it, is to put myself through something difficult and transformative and share the result with as many people as possible.

And what could be more difficult than turning a dirty sheep fleece into a sweater as someone who had never even knit before? You'll notice that the most expensive part of this by far was the labor. And that is not the case with most clothing because that labor isn't being

fairly paid. We should all do our best to support brands that are fixing that. There's no sewing machine that operates itself. All clothing is handmade. Buy less, buy better.

So many amazing people helped me along the way and their information is linked in the description.