Artist and teacher Linda Bergstrom shares her love of fiber traditions with students and visitors to her Bluffdale farm.

It all started with a dream she had in her mid-20s. She was seeing herself, middle-aged, spinning wool on an old-school spinning wheel in front of a field of sheep.

“At that time I knew nothing about [spinning wool], so I had to figure out what this was all about,” Linda Bergstrom says of her dream. “I started thinking, maybe this is my destiny, maybe this is what I should be doing.”

Thirty years later, her dream has manifested in Bluffdale, Utah, on an acre of land, where she has her very own field of sheep— plus alpacas—from which she harvests wool for yarn.

Daily farm work includes caring for her alpacas, whose fleece provides a prized fiber for spinning and weaving.

“I always loved the fiber arts, and so I learned to spin, I learned to weave, so I could have my farm one day,” Bergstrom says. “My art practice took a huge 180 when I got the farm. I was painting for a while and now I hardly paint anymore. Now it is mainly just fiber art.”

Bergstrom was an art teacher for about 20 years before she pivoted her practice from painting to an entirely fiber-arts focus—weaving and spinning, along with some dyeing and felting. She’s also had to learn how to care for her three alpacas and five Icelandic sheep, eight chickens and hives of bees on the grounds of Bergstrom Farms.

“The artist side of me knew what I wanted to do—take an animal’s fiber and turn it into a finished product like clothing or yarn. It was an interesting process because I knew how to do all the artist parts, but the animal part was a little harder,” she says. “It was such a big learning curve.”

Since Utah is such a hot, dry climate the alpacas can easily suffer heat stroke and must be shorn for their health. Bergstrom has her alpacas sheared once a year by a compassionate shearer, managing the task gently and with loving care for something that could easily get aggressive towards the animals. The sheep get shorn twice a year. Linda has made what she calls “living rugs” from the sheep shears that come off in one piece. “The back, it looks like a pelt, like we skinned the sheep and it was dead, but I like the sheep alive.”

Utah is unique in how many local mills we have to process raw fiber like Bergstrom’s home-grown wool varieties. “Strangely enough, in Utah we have three fiber mills, which is very rare for a state [of this size].” Usually, Bergstrom takes her wool to the mill to be processed into yarn. In the case of the wool from a very beloved alpaca, named Patchy, who recently passed, Bergstrom will process all that fleece by hand. Her emotional connection with the animal is so strong that she wants to get her hands in it as much as possible. “Processing it by hand is a more ancient way of doing it, and it’s very time-consuming, but you get a satisfaction from having raised the animal,” she says.

When working with sheep wool, you have to go through a process called scouring to wash the fleece of its lanolin. Lanolin is the greasy material sheep produce as a natural protectant from extreme environments and acts as waterproofing. It is a secretion from their skin—basically sweat, Bergstrom says—that helps keep them moisturized and protected, which is especially important since their native origins are typically harsh climes.

By contrast, alpacas don’t have grease or lanolin and produce a very high-end fiber. The wool is hypoallergenic and so soft it doesn’t feel like the typical scratchy wool on skin. “It’s soft and luxurious,” Bergstrom says. “It still has those same properties of warmth, but it’s just so soft.” Alpaca feces can also be applied directly to the garden as a manure, which is particularly beneficial since alpacas have three stomachs that process the manure enough to be directly planted into.

Alpacas are llamas’ gentler cousins, says Bergstrom. But they’re still active spitters, to guard their food. You cannot put boy and girl alpacas in the same pen for their similarity to rabbits in their breeding habits. “They don’t have heat, so they can get pregnant at any time and want to make babies all the time.” Bergstrom’s friend down the way from the farm has all the females to match her males. One is pregnant, due in October after an 11-month gestation period. The babies, known as cria, start growing harvestable fleece right away. “Let’s say the babies are born in October, and we’re doing a shearing in May, we could get that fleece in that first shearing,” Linda says.

After removing vegetative matter from shorn fleece, the next step is carding—or brushing—it. Carding the wool, whether on a drum carder—a spinning drum with protruding nails—or hand cards—two nail-plated brushes that are pulled against each other—aligns the fibers all in one direction. Those fibers can then be pulled off the carders into a roving—a long, narrow bundle of fibers, which is what you’ll get from a mill—or into a rolag—which is exactly what it sounds like, a rolled log of the directional fibers, wrapped around a dowel and  ready to be spun on a spinning wheel.

Since rolags can only be hand-made, “it is more raw and fluffier, whereas the roving is so aligned that you’re not going to get those poofy bumps or awkward pieces in what people call art yarn–very primitive and imperfect-looking yarn,” Bergstrom says. With her beloved Patchy’s fleece, Bergstrom wanted “to get my hands in it as much as I can, so I am hand-carding it.” It will take her about a year.

Linda Bergstrom’s “Field and Flax” at the Springville Museum of Art’s Spring Salon.

“When you see the Navajo elders making blankets, they are hand carding, as [are others] in different parts of the world, certainly the Peruvians, where alpacas are their main source of everything, their fiber, their meat, et cetera,” Bergstrom says.

In addition to learning to work the animal fibers, Linda has experimented with planting indigo to dye with and flax linen to harvest for weaving. For the flax linen, “each tiny, skinny stem has about five pieces of fiber in it. To process it, you have to go through an archaic 20-step process that is very labor-intensive.” The end product was used in her piece in the Spring Salon at the Springville Museum, which sold on opening night. “I incorporated things like grapevine, dried eucalyptus and flax linen…I am going to do more organic, nature inspired weaving after this.”

In a frenzied world of digital media, Bergstrom has dedicated herself to ancient traditions of times past, before fast fashion and mass production of fibers. Her knowledge began online, but she found that wasn’t sufficient. “I couldn’t just keep learning from videos, I needed to have someone who has done this before…I have a belief that if you have a farm like this, and you dedicate your life to this, you have to have a mentor for everything,” she says. “I have an alpaca mentor—required upon purchase of any alpaca—I have a sheep mentor, a goat mentor, bee mentors, chicken mentors. It’s [about] tapping your community to learn and bring that knowledge to other people.”

Adding natural elements like lavender, Bergstrom incorporates organic textures into her woven pieces.

And now, 30 years after her initial dream and eight years since beginning her farming journey, Bergstrom has become a mentor herself. “I have a passion for this, I can’t keep this to myself, I need to show people this.” At Bergstrom Farms, she hosts classes behind her house, on her deck and on the grass of her backyard, under tents. Family reunions, book clubs, couples out on date night have all come to the farm to take a class and walk away with a handmade craft and new skill. And maybe one of Bergstrom’s pieces—an old camper is outfitted with her creations: embroidery hoops framing felted wool pieces, tea towels dyed with home-grown indigo, skeins of wool from her animals, etc.

As a teacher, Bergstrom has long guided students in their artistic journeys. At Bergstrom Farms, she’s sharing her years’ worth of skills with anyone wanting to learn the ancient processes she has grown to love dearly. Almost as much as she loves her animals.

Two of Bergstrom’s alpacas, whose fleece is sheared annually for soft, luxurious yarn.

You can shop for products or sign up for a textile class at bergstromfarms.com.

All images by Steve Coray.

Genevieve Vahl

Genevieve Vahl is a writer, farmer and artist from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Her writing focuses on how art and community intersect, how to bring access to food and covering climate solutions around the Salt Lake Valley. She also writes poetry, binds artist books, makes paper and runs cyanotype prints from film.