A Blanket Relief

The Maine Blanket is, however, a product with a mission. Behind it is an idealistic wool-gathering enterprise that promotes the blanket as "an heirloom for today, conserving Maine farms for tomorrow."

One of those properties is Meadowcroft, an 80-acre sheep farm in Washington, a town halfway between Augusta and the coast. A flock of 100 sheep, accompanied by a pair of horses and a milk cow, grazes in a meadow within sight of the farmhouse.

A quartet of farm dogs (two black-and-white border collies, a Great Pyrenees, and large white kuvasz) greets visitors to Meadowcroft, which itself is a mongrel assortment of buildings in various stages of construction and disrepair. Thick skeins of dyed-wool yarn drip-drying in the sun over 5-gallon buckets line up on the tar-papered foundation of what was once the main farmhouse.

The mistress of Meadowcroft and the driving force behind the Maine Blanket is Nanney Kennedy, a sturdy woman who devotes her prodigious energies to maintaining a pastoral way of life raising sheep, spinning and dyeing wool, taking saunas, riding horses, Morris dancing, and peddling blankets.

"I'm really not all that crunchy," Kennedy says with a laugh as she contemplates the lifestyle she has chosen.

Kennedy, 43, grew up in Maine, where her grandfather founded Camp Kieve on Damariscotta Lake in Nobleboro, and in Massachusetts, where her father was one of the founders of the Pingree School in South Hamilton.

After graduating from Maine's Bowdoin College in 1981, Kennedy spent most of the 1980s acquiring the resume of a modern-day sheepherder. She studied wool grading in New Zealand, learned natural-dye techniques on Nantucket, worked as a night shepherd for the Forbes family on Naushon Island in Buzzards Bay, and designed her own graduate research project, "Sheep Grazing for Conservation Management, at the University of Massachusetts."

In 1988, Kennedy and her then husband purchased Meadowcroft and spent the next two years restoring it; fire destroyed the farmhouse in 1990. She now lives above her sheep in a combined farmhouse/barn.

Separated in 1994 and divorced in 1998, Kennedy found herself the single mother of two growing boys -- Ben, now 16, and Amos, now 14. She struggled to support their farming way of life by selling meat, spun wool, and high-nitrogen composting inoculant (sheep manure) at local farmers' markets.

Determined to make sheep farming more profitable, Kennedy established Seacolors, a one-of-a-kind sweater business that uses yarn colored with a seawater-dyeing process. The hand-knit sweaters sell for between $200 and $300.

The Maine Blanket Project began in 2000 with a failed attempt by the Maine Sheep Breeders Association to add value to its members' small (less than 20,000 pounds) annual wool pool. When the association was unsuccessful in its efforts to find a Maine mill to manufacture the blankets or to find a market for them, Kennedy stepped in and purchased the wool in 2001, then found a Canadian mill to make the blankets.

She produces 1,000 to 1,500 Maine Blankets, which come in four sizes, ranging from the 48-inch-by-72-inch Napper ($120) to the 78-inch-by-104-inch Canada King ($275). The blankets have a white field with one-color accent stripes at each end. Kennedy also recently introduced blankets with color backgrounds and stripes.

Made of finer grades of wool, a king-size Maine Blanket weighs just 5.5 pounds compared with a 10-pound Hudson's Bay king selling for around $400. "You can get all the warmth without the weight," says Kennedy.

Nanney Kennedy now soldiers on in her campaign to help "good small farmers run better small businesses" by purchasing wool from individual Maine farmers. She insists that the Maine Blanket has potential to support farms in her state, in the process preserving farmland, open space, and a traditional way of life that is fast disappearing from the New England landscape.

Ultimately, the Maine Blanket may not prove to be the salvation of the Maine sheep farm, but in an age of throwaway synthetics, it is an investment in something real and lasting.

Edgar Allen Beem is a freelance writer living in Maine. To learn more about Maine Blankets online, visit www.getwool.com.