Alaskans Turn Dog Hair Into Yarn

ANCHORAGE - Dog owners know their pets produce two things in abundance: love and fur.

Only the fur can be spun.

"I think dog hair is one of the finest wools you can find," said Shirley Boniface, an Anchorage dog owner who shows her champion blue merle sheltie, Sterling, at competitions nationwide.

"I love the feel of it."

Boniface said grooming Sterling and her three other shelties yielded mounds of silvery gray, black and white fur which she routinely bagged up and threw away.

But as a knitter in a climate where cold persists seven months of the year, Boniface thought the fur should be used. She started saving. After about 18 months there was enough sheltie hair to turn over to a local spinner.

"I wanted to be able to say, `Well, here is my champion and he gave me this hat,' " Boniface said.

Spinners say it makes sense that Alaskans want their dog hair put to use; few states have used dogs the way Alaska does.

As recently as 40 years ago, dog teams still carried mail to remote Alaska villages. In 1925, sled dogs captured national attention when teams rushed lifesaving diphtheria serum to Nome to stop an epidemic. The route is covered today by mushers in the internationally known Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race.

But a place in Alaska history doesn't always translate into success in the yarn business.

Kay Hathhorne, owner of an Anchorage weaving studio, said unless it's hair from their own pets, most people are offended at the idea of dog-hair yarn.

"They say, `Oh, gross, doesn't it smell?' "

In fact, Hathhorne said, well-washed fur is odorless and gets fuzzier with subsequent sudsing.

But she got a lesson in misplaced sneers when she once displayed in her shop a latch-hook rug made of spun Airedale fur.

"It was absolutely beautiful," she said.

Interest fizzled once her customers found out it was dog hair.

"Obviously they'd never been around a farm and smelled sheep," Hathhorne said. "They smell a lot worse than your dog does."

Those who turn dog fur into mittens and sweaters and floppy berets say it's durable and warm, plentiful and cheap.

"A lot of people who love their dogs want something made of their fur," said Sue Bannister, an Anchorage spinner who just finished a husky-fur headband for a friend who's moving to Texas.

"There's nothing you can't do with it. I have a friend who used fur from a couple of dogs and did a really big coverlet in different colors of gray."

Expert skill is needed to work with dog hair, spinners say, since it lacks the natural lanolin of sheep fleece and has no crimp, so it's harder to work into a strand.

To get around that, spinners use a "short-draw" method - tugging out only little tufts at a time.

Sheep's wool sometimes is blended with the fur, and spinners often coat their hands with baby oil to add lubrication to keep the dog hair glued together.

Not all breeds are suitable: Fur from the short-haired husky is difficult. Clipped, crinkly poodle hair is worse. A top choice is the long white underfur of the Samoyed.

Tough outer fur, known as guard hair, is discarded entirely.

From her home in Hope, about 25 miles south of Anchorage, Diane Olthuis has made a cottage industry out of dog hair. Olthuis runs a small textile business divided about evenly between musk-ox and dog-hair yarns.

Although she supplies many dog-fur skeins to a store in Colorado, where dog-mushing is becoming popular, the bulk of her customers are Alaskans.

"There may be a higher level of interest because people are more dog crazy up here," she said.