In Iceland, we have a lot of Hematite or Mýrarrauði in the ground. It makes everything reddish brown that touches it and does not wash off easily.
Hematite is a mineral (Fe₂O_{3 ),} that is in the soil. It is relatively heavy and very rich in iron (70%) and until the beginning of the year 1500, farmers in Iceland made tools from the iron that they got from the hematite, by using a special method to do so. I will not go further in that here, but you can find articles about that online. (https://ferlir.is/raudablastur-myrarraudi/)

Hematite is in most of our ditches and also in what we call “MÝRI” in Icelandic. Mýri is a very wet grassland. Walking over it requires boots or your socks, shoes and feet will be wet and maybe also reddish brown. The grass in the mýri is however very tasteful for the sheep and other animals and sometimes we see horses up to their knees in water, eating the grass that grows in the mýri.
When the grass starts growing in the ditches and make them look like they have solid ground, they can be dangerous for livestock, because the animal wants to get a bite from the grass, and goes in there and it can be tricky to get out of there again. We sometimes need to help them up. That can be a heavy job, especially with sheep, because they get so very heavy when all their thick and lovely wool gets wet from the water in the ditch and the dirt in the bottom of the ditch also holds tight on to the animals feet, giving no support for it to put its feet on.

This lamb was helped out of a ditch in the fall and it was reddish brown up to it’s sides.

Now this colour doesn’t wash off easily in the wool and in most cases it just stays there. It can sometimes be a pretty colour in the wool, but most of the time it just ruins the wool and it is thrown away.
Well. I don’t like to throw things away. So I decided to collect it and put aside and spin it together when I had enough to make it worth spinning. This winter I somehow have had more of this wool than usually, and now I want to show you the results.

This wool is all covered with Hematite, but most of the time it is just in the lower parts of the wool, around the thighs and on the sides of the animal. After washing, picking and carding the wool was holding a solid colour and there was a huge difference in the wool with the hematite and similar wool without it. The yellowish, reddish colour had mixed in and made a solid colour that looks beige or golden in some way.

This is technically the same colour of wool. Both are white, but the yellowish wool is white wool contaminated by the hematite. It is actually a nice colour when we start to work with it.

Here is the roving pulled by the drawframe, but I put clean white roving beside it to show the difference in colour before taking the photo.

Now the yarn is ready. Clean white to the right, Hematite white to the left.

  The sweater that the yarn is lying on is knitted with another batch of hematite white that we span earlier. That yarn was not as strong in colour as the one that is lying on top of the sweater. It had less of the hematite and more of white wool when it was processed and therefore the colour is a bit lighter.
It actually turns out quite nicely in a knitted garment. I also think that one skein of hematite-white would be a lovely pattern colour in a brown garment.

We have washed the skeins, and we washed the sweater, and the colour of the hematite holds. It does not fade in the washing. At least not immediately. Of course it might fade with many washes and time will have to reveal that, but then again, we usually don’t wash the garments knitted with wool all to often.

The feeling of the yarn is a tiny bit different from the other yarn we make. I want to say it is a tiny little bit more hard, but still it is soft. And the sweater feels the same. Some people, when sniffing the yarn, can smell a small scent of iron in it, but not everyone.

So there we have wool that is most of the time thrown away, because the colour doesn’t fit. Spun into yarn. Knitted in a sweater. Ready to wear.
And the worthless wool is now worth something. That is indeed something to aim for.
I took the photos that are in the article, but the photo on the front I found online. It is taken by Harpa Hreinsdóttir. She is a teacher. Thank you Harpa for allowing me to use the photo.