“Knitting With Dog Hair,” a classic how-to book from the 1990s by Kendall Crolius, fueled a dedicated movement. An updated 30th anniversary edition was published this month.
An affable tumbleweed.
That’s what the dusty, flaxen fluff from my 8-year-old golden retriever Yofi looks like floating through my apartment on any given day.
And when he blows his coat twice a year — during spring and fall — look out. There’s even more fluff to scoop up or vacuum.
Now, this winter, the high season of knits, a potentially off-putting question is being revisited: Instead of vacuuming it up, should I be knitting with it instead?
The author Kendall Crolius, 70, explains it all in “Knitting With Dog Hair,” a lighthearted yet serious instructional book on the quirky craft that shows how to collect dog fuzz and spin, dye and knit with the yarn known as chiengora. The book is now available in a revised 30th anniversary edition published by the imprint Liveright at W.W. Norton & Company in early December. (She also has a popular website.)
Ms. Crolius’s friend, Jim Charlton, a book packager who died in 2022, got the ball rolling in the early 1980s. She had knitted a vest for him and his wife, Barbara Binswanger, her best friend from college, out of fluff from their Great Pyrenees, Ollie. He drew up the proposal for the book and pitched it for about a decade.
In 1988, he immediately dazzled Robert Weil, a newly arrived senior editor then at St. Martin’s Press.
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