Mountain Colors

A Small Business with an Incredible View

Those of you who guessed that I was going to get a chance to visit Mountain Colors were completely correct. After wrapping up my business trip I headed over to Corvallis to see where a good deal of hand-dyed magic is made. Leslie, one of the owners of Mountain Colors invited me to stop by when I first mentioned I was going to be in the Bitterroot Valley on business sometime back. It was a real treat to get to meet Leslie and to get to see how their dyeing operation worked.

Unfortunately (at least from the point of view of getting to see a lot of the dyeing process in action) I got there a bit late in the afternoon when they were beginning to wrap up dyeing operations for the day. Leslie took the time to give me a short tour that started in the dyeing room. This room is filled with plastic containers and soaking yarn heat baths and dye bottles filled with rich colors and the air is filled with the smell of vinegar -- exactily what a dyeing room should be like. When I got there, they were dyeing mostly rich deep solid green.

Once the yarn is dyed and rinsed, it moves out to dry.

Drying Pheasant

This is just one of several racks full of drying yarn. What you see drying here is (I think) Bearfoot in the colorway "Pheasant" -- which I used once, long ago, in a pair of socks for my friend, Judy.

Once the yarn is dry, it is given to people who skein it up in the put-up weights that Mountain Colors wholesales. Then it moves to the packing room -- a room full of boxes with yarn store names on them. When a box is complete, it gets introduced to the UPS man who takes it on its trip across the US to its final destination.

Mountain Colors has an incredible array of yarns. All of their stock yarns have been carefully selected for good "hand" when you knit with them, and some of them have been created especially for Mountain Colors. Leslie told me that their "Wooly Feathers" eyelash yarn was designed when they found a yarn made of chicken feathers that they liked -- they worked with a mill to create a mohair/nylon blend that had the look of that yarn. The resulting Wooly Feathers is a really unique eyelash style yarn that really does evoke feathery thoughts. Twizzle is another interesting yarn. It's a 4 ply where one of the plys is a silk ply that takes up the dye differently, creating interesting color contrasts in the yarn.

Not all the yarn ends up being shipped out, however. At the shop in Corvallis you can find mill ends and left over skeins from store orders that you can take home with you. The extra skeins are sorted by color and it's a great deal of fun to see how one colorway can look very different when used with different fibers. But perhaps the best image is just getting to see so many of their beautiful colorways in one place.

A Wall of Color

This photo represents one of 4 walls of bins. There are an incredible number of colorways and solids. Leslie told me that they usually retire three colorways every year and introduce 5 new ones. Almost all of their colorways are based off of 5 (I hope I am remembering that number correctly) stock dye colors. It's always amazing to me what a skilled dyer can do by understanding how to manipulate the depth of shade and how to combine colors.

I wasn't really planning on buying anything when I went out there -- as anyone who has been in my yarn room knows, I have a fairly robust stash. But I fell in love with one of their newer yarns -- 3 Ply Wool, which is a 100% targhee wool yarn. If you remember my Sigil sweater, it was made out of Sweetgrass Targhee (also a Montana product, by the way). As a result of that sweater, I have a very soft wooly place in my heart for targhee yarn. It is soft and lofty and warm and is good for outerwear and closer to the skin garments. When I found the box of 3-ply Wool mill ends, I found myself putting together my own rainbow to remind me of Montana.

Wooly Montana Rainbow

That, my friends, is 40 ounces (just under 3 lbs) of hand-dyed aran weight targhee yarn. Just as soft as can be, and destined, I think, for a small afghan made up of random log cabin squares. I pretty much cleaned them out of the 3-ply wool mill ends, so you might want to wait a little while if you were hoping to find some of your own on a trip to Corvallis.

A big thanks to Leslie for being a very kind host and spending time with me today. I had a lovely visit, and definitely plan to get back next time I'm in Montana.