I’m excited to share the next yarn for the “Story of a Yarn” series. This time we focused on Worsted Merino yarn from Cactus Hill Farm about 25 miles south of Alamosa, Colorado. Cactus Hill Farm is a certified organic farm. They offer raw fleeces, yarns, and roving raised on Cactus Hill. 

Cactus Hill Farm is a multi-generational family farm near the southern border of central Colorado. The farm is about two hours north of Ghost Ranch in New Mexico and near the Colorado Great Sand Dunes. Their website says the farm has been “caring for sheep and the land since 1867”. That works out to 10ish years before Colorado became a state and when the area was still part of Mexico. 

I love it when a yarn tells me more about it!!! From their website — “This beautiful worsted Merino yarn is wonderfully soft and fast to work up. Perfect for close-to-skin wear. Raised right here on Cactus Hill Farm, processed by Yampa Valley Fiberworks, and kettle-dyed on the farm. The natural variation in the kettle-dyed yarn will make a great, unique finished product.  Our colors vary by dye lot and yarn, so we encourage customers to purchase enough yarn to finish a project.”

Stats of the Yarn:

• Name and from where: Merino Worsted from a dye lot named Glacier from Cactus Hill Farm in Colorado
• Fiber Content: 100% Merino
• Weight/Yardage per Skein: 3 oz skeins, approximately 200 yards, worsted weight
• Plys: 2-ply
• Feel of the Yarn: In the skein, the yarn feels soft and lofty while still being a solid yarn. I love the kettle-dyed variations of the blues in the yarn. I’m really enjoying this yarn!! I don’t always love a 2-ply construction but I do in this yarn.
• Knitting up: I swatched simple stockinette stitch, cables, and texture. I started with the US Size 6 that I normally use with worsted-weight yarn. But the yarn wasn’t happy with that size needle and it lost loft and bounce. I went up a needle size to US Size 7 and liked the results much better. The cables are great, the stockinette stitch is nice, and the textured stitches are better than I expected. I thought the texture would disappear in the kettle dye color variations but it really didn’t. I loved this yarn so much in the cables that I cast on a new Hot Chocolate Hat immediately after finishing the swatch. I would love a sweater out of this yarn.
• Care and Washing: No information on the ball band. Experience says to hand wash gently and lay flat to dry. I’ve written a blog post about the process I almost always follow for hand-washing here.
• After Washing/Blocking: This yarn is even more soft after washing and blocking. The cables did flatten a bit with washing but I still love them. The gauge did not change for me at all between washed/blocked and not. It knit up at 4.5 stitches and 6 rows per inch for me and still measures the same after washing and blocking.

Here’s a look at my in-progress Hot Chocolate Hat out of Cactus Hill Farm Merino Worsted in the color Glacier!

If you’d like to hear more about this yarn, listen to us talk about this yarn and others in Season 4 of the Geminate Podcast.

Cactus Hill Farm offers many different colors of this same worsted Merino yarn, they have fewer choices in the bulky version of the yarn, plus some beautiful natural color roving and yarns at the time of recording. As with all small farms and businesses, the exact products they offer will vary with the seasons and natural cycles of the farm.