Last summer I agreed to spin dog hair as a demonstration at the Sheep Dog Trials held on Vashon. The demonstration was great fun – children loved the spinning wheel and dog owners offered me bags of dog fur – but I walked away with a bunch of dog yarn singles with no real plan for their use.

Vashon Sheepdog Trials - photo by Myra Willingham

Vashon Sheepdog Trials – photo by Myra Willingham

For the demonstration, I prepared the fur for spinning using hand carders. Information to know: 1) you don’t use the long outer coat if you can avoid it, you want the undercoat; 2) dog fur is different from wool and requires a tighter twist to hold together; 3) because the fibers are short, they provide a pretty halo effect after spinning.

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If you are trying this yourself, I recommend an open-air location. Dog hair is very light and flyaway and I found working on it outside to be much easier than trying to manage the fiber in the house. (If you have a dog with this sort of coat, you probably deal with this issue all the time.)

I spun the dog yarn on my Ashford Traditional wheel, keeping the fur of the two dogs separate. After the trials, I created 2 skeins of 2-ply yarn, spinning s-twist singles and plying z-twist. One was grey and white (Amos is a black and white dog) and the other was tan and white (Finn is collie-colored). You can see the halo in the balls shown below.

web finn and amos yarn

With the singles as inspiration, I decided on a scarf, since dog hair is known to be quite hot and is best used for an accessory. I chose a simple 2-2 twill with a very loose sett (8 epi) and placed the weft at 8 ppi because I wanted a nice drape. I tried various warp yarns: straight black or white contrasted too starkly with the dog yarns, but the brown and white Norwegian wool handspun (seen in the fringes) was a good complement to both. (By the way, sampling was critical to getting the look I wanted – I recommend it whenever you are working with new fibers or colors.) The resulting scarf has a soft hand and is pleasingly fuzzy (see portfolio images). Dog fur is not the most common material, but it does produce a beautiful yarn. I think Amos and Finn will be happy with the result.

Amos and Finn