Monroe woman keeps knitters in wool

Published 9:00 pm Thursday, May 25, 2006

Gretchen Wilson is living the country dream: a small ranch with a home business, baby critters to bottle feed and sweet sheep’s milk to pour on breakfast cereal.

This is the life many people crave; a slice of rural property, no commute and working your own hours.

Gretchen’s Wool Mill is the culmination of years of percolating ideas and searching for the right equipment at the right price. With only one other wool-processing business in this area, she knew she could find plenty of work.

“I will be processing people’s raw fleeces (from sheep, llamas or alpacas) into clean and combed fiber,” Wilson said. From there it can be hand spun for yarn or used for batting in quilts and comforters, she said.

She said I’d be surprised at how much the area needs another carding company. Carding is the process that cleans and readies the raw wool. From the sacks and sacks of stacked material visible before even opening her shop door, I could see what she was talking about.

See for yourself at an open house and spin-in, planned for noon to 4 p.m. Saturday at 28014 120th St. SE, Monroe.

Visitors will be soothed by the serenity of the property and impressed inside the dandy shop the Wilsons fashioned to hold equipment. Rob Wilson, a letter carrier in Bothell, is becoming a jack-of-all-trades and repairman for all sorts of machinery.

They bought a used carding machine in Sequim that took six men to unload. A half-ton centrifugal extractor to dry laundry, purchased used in Snohomish, fell off the truck when they tried to get it to the farm.

Now everything’s ready to go, and work awaits.

“I have three years worth of fleeces backed up myself,” Wilson said. “My good friend owns Snohomish Custom Carding, but she has been unable to work lately due to a family illness. She had a one-year waiting list before she stopped working.”

Snohomish Custom Carding owner Linda Frymire said there is a need for their service in our area.

“There are only a few of us who do this,” Frymire said. “I haven’t advertised at all. I started 10 years ago and have all the work I can possibly do.”

Frymire plans to specialize in dying and blending colors and selling rovings, the strands of twisted wool, at her shop.

While wool brings sheep to mind, a good portion of Wilson’s business will come from small ranches with alpaca and llama fiber to process.

In the shop behind the lovely house, I saw that after folks drop off their clippings, Wilson washes, dries, fluffs and puts the fibers through a carding machine, which produces a nice roll of roving or batts.

Wilson, 46, has an arts degree from the University of Washington. She has been a homemaker and volunteer for many years. She’s been an educational assistant for special needs classes, music and school libraries. And she’s active at her church.

Wilson grew up showing and raising Morgan horses and is the barn manager at her parents’ Sultan farm.

“For the past 15 years we have sought to raise as much of our own produce as possible, and so we consider ourselves homesteaders, sort of,” Wilson said. “I bake most of our bread and snacks, make all our food from scratch, freeze produce in the fall and make most of our cheeses, yogurt and soap.”

They raise their own animals for meat and have chickens for eggs and sheep for dairy. She spins, weaves, crochets and felts the wool that comes from her small flock of sheep.

I first wrote about Wilson 10 years ago when she was the Chicken Lady in Gold Bar. Her family, including son, Peter, who graduates in June from Seattle Pacific University, lived on a much smaller spread. She helped start a 4-H purebred poultry show.

Working the ranch takes a heap of time.

“Instead of working away from home a lot to make money to buy these things, I make things myself and have superior products,” she said. “I buy most of my clothes second-hand, as I believe strongly in recycling everything we can.”

This city girl was given a farm tour and saw darling baby lambs and their mothers. Where was the daddy sheep? Wilson explained the father comes from Chehalis for a month of heavy dating, then leaves the mothers behind.

Men.

Columnist Kristi O’Harran: 425-339-3451 or oharran@heraldnet.com.