Yarn Respite

There is a typical "pattern" that I follow for blog posting: before a semester and then at the other end, when all that's left is to grade papers.  So here we are, at the other end of the Spring 2019 semester.  It began rather harshly with a significant family loss, so from January until May, I've been bimodally immersed in either family matters or academic matters, with not much time left for yarn matters.  Luckily I have multiple projects that require only modest attention, and those have sustained me.  But now! Now it's time to play with YARN.

There is no better way to inspire yarn playing than to visit a spinnery.  A few of my yarn pals and I spent a recent weekend in Putney, Vermont, to get away from reality and catch up with each others' hectic lives.  This included a tour of Green Mountain Spinnery.  Oogy and I had toured GMS several years ago and found it fascinating, so I suggested to these pals that we do the same.  It was a hit.  We also traveled east for about an hour to visit Harrisville Designs, but that's a story for another post.

Welcome to Green Mountain Spinnery, Putney, Vermont, USA

We stayed across the street at the Putney Inn, which made visiting the Spinnery rather easy. It was a Saturday, so the machines were not functioning.  They were whirling loudly when Oogy and I were there, which made it interesting to see at a distance, but not possible to get too close, for safety reasons.  It was also much easier to hear our guide when the spinnery was on pause.  Their website has a virtual tour that provides lots of interesting details, so I'll only supply some highlights here.

We started in a series of rooms that were filled to the ceiling with fleeces that needed to be processed.  It smelled rather nice, if you like sheep odor.

Clean wool starts here...

After learning about the scouring and picking process that yields clean fluffed-up wool, we examined the carding machine.  I have a drum carder at home that produces little batts of wool for spinning, but this machine is like 4000 of those.  If you look closely you can see the nail-like spikes that catch the wool and convince each strand to line up with the others. 

...then makes its way through here to become roving.

Then there is the most important step, spinning. It was very interesting to hear about the challenges of making sure the resulting yarn is the correct weight and is twisted consistently.  It eventually becomes the yarn that is so enticingly displayed in the little store.

I was united with a few skeins of 100% wool fingering weight in color moorit, and a skein of white Simply Fine fingering weight 40% kid mohair and 60% fine wool.  They are coming together quite nicely in a poncho.

It's raining, so I can't mow the grass.  I guess I'll have to spend the day knitting.

I did a small gauge swatch, which turns out to have been a total waste of time because the emerging project is much larger than expected.  I had only a vague notion of how the poncho would come together, so it's been easy to abandon that plan.  Another plan is forming slowly as I knit.  I'm using Elizabeth Lovick's The Magic of Shetland Lace Knitting to combine multiple lace patterns.  I'm doing the lace portions in white, and intermittent blocks of moorit in stockinette.  So much fun!