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?

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 & Co. in early December. (She also has a popular website.)

Crolius’ 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 a sweater for 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.

The editorial board turned the idea down at least three times. Then, during a Christmas Eve party in the 1990s, Weil, with a twinkle in his eye, finally talked the chair of St. Martin’s — who was encouraged by his wife, another senior editor — into publishing the book.

For anyone under the impression that dogs are being skinned, perish the thought. Most hair is shed or brushed. Hair that is cut may or may not spin well, and most spinners advise against it.

“We’re not Cruella de Vil,” said Weil, a celebrated nonfiction editor who has edited three Pulitzer Prize-winning books, loves dogs and has a sense of humor. “This is honoring the dog.”

Decades later, Crolius is still actively knitting away with dog hair for friends and family. She is quick to volunteer her preferred breeds for sweaters — Samoyeds, huskies, Great Pyrenees and golden retrievers. (Cat hair is also usable, though a little more difficult to spin, finer and shorter, and often mixed with other fibers.)

“There is no such thing as anything unspinnable,” Crolius said in an interview from her home in Chautauqua, New York, “except Mexican hairless.”

The craft was nothing new to those in fiber arts or the Pacific West Coast Salish Indigenous peoples who bred woolly dogs, now extinct, for thousands of years. But the book created a movement full of disciples — Chiengora Hand Spinners, a Facebook group, now has more than 1,300 members — and made the idea accessible to the public.

Jeannie Sanke, a popular spinner and knitter based in Evanston, Illinois, sells custom dog-hair items through her website. Her scarves range from $150 to $400 and her sweaters from $1,200 to $1,500. With a yearslong backlog of orders, she is now finishing a Samoyed blanket ordered four years ago and is not accepting new clients.

Every project — which includes cleaning, untangling the fibers in a process called carding, possibly blending the hair with another fiber, spinning and knitting — is different. The process could take from six weeks for a hat to more than a year for a large blanket. She cannot accept dog-hair donations and refers people to Matter of Trust, which makes felted hair mats to soak up oil spills.

“Three times in my life I went, ‘Whoa,’” Sanke said. “When I met Leonard Bernstein; when I met Jack O’Callahan, who scored against the Soviet Union in the 1980 Olympics; and when I got an email from Kendall Crolius.”

Crolius, who started knitting at age 6, has worked as a stage manager in the theater, a marketing executive and has been in leadership development for CEOs.

In the 1980s, she got hooked on spinning dog hair after her husband gave her spinning lessons for her birthday at a local fiber arts store in their neighborhood in New York.

“She’s kind of the superstar,” said Jeanne Yu, a high school teacher in Los Altos, Calif., who has two Great Pyrenees that she brushes for 30 minutes once a week, saving their fluff in paper bags. She took up spinning in earnest in 2020 when schools were closed during the coronavirus pandemic and made her first spindle out of a chopstick and roller blade wheel.

“Every year, I have enough to make two scarves and a hat,” Yu said.

Beverly Wilpon hosts Knit & Knosh, a knitting group that meets weekly at Ess-a-Bagel on First Avenue in New York.

Her reaction to dog hair: “Other than giggling?”

She usually sticks to merino, alpaca, silk and combinations of those, and said chiengora would not be her preference.

But, she added, “I think knitting a sweater for a dog with dog hair would be fabulous.”

Now, every time I see Yofi’s fluff floating around, I think, What a nice scarf. Maybe.