WHY SPINCYCLE YARNS WORKS Who works: Twenty-eight people work at Spincycle Yarns. That includes owners Rachel Price and Kate Burge, as well as those who work in the retail storefront, the mill, the dye house and the administrative offices. What works: Spincycle has effectively scaled its eco-conscious business from small-scale to mid-scale, retaining its labour-friendly values.
What works for the bioregion: Spincycle sources its wool from the United States and takes a zero-waste approach to its yarn. With plans to renovate a building in downtown Bellingham, its operations will soon be housed under one roof, reducing its carbon footprint. For nearly a decade, the Spinsters were a fixture at the Bellingham Farmers Market.
Their booth was easy to find: market goers just needed to look for their brightly coloured yarns in vibrant cyan and deep magenta. Founders Kate Burge and Rachel Price commuted to the market by bike — neither one owned a car at the time — and set up most Saturdays. The duo, who named their company Spincycle, specialized in a type of craft practised by few others in the early 2000s: kettle-dyeing and hand-spinning wool into beautiful skeins.
Unlike most commercial yarns, which are spun and then dyed, the yarn Burge and Price create is dyed first, before it’s spun into yarn. “The hues sunset into one another and where the surprise tones that occur when one colour blends with another is as unique from skein to skein as a fingerprint,” the company says. .