So, I'm back.
I arrived home this afternoon. I don't have the energy to post photos of the various projects I finished while on vacation, but those will be coming in the next days.

I will take a few minutes to talk about the fiberly highlight of my vacation.

I got to visit Blackberry Ridge Woolen Mill. Yes, visit. They are located in Mt. Horeb, Wisconsin, which was about 25 miles west of Madison, where I was at some meetings.

It was, as Bill and Ted would say, most excellent.

It's way out in the country - a pleasant enough drive from Madison; it's off County Road J, which is itself off of Pine Bluff Road, which is itself off of another road whose name I forget, which connects up to the Beltway.

We found the place with no problems, thanks to the directions the man gave over the phone. We first went into the shop - it's a small shop but they have all the patterns and sample skeins of all the yarns, and kits for many of the projects on the website (and a few I don't remember seeing).

As always, it's almost overload for me when I go into a yarn shop, because I get to them so seldom. But I did immediately find a sock kit I wanted, and a hat pattern and some yarn to make it up. (My father told my mom and me that he'd buy us each $100 worth of supplies; most generous. We wound up buying slightly less than $200 (before taxes) between us, but I have to admit I was the little pig and most of that was kits I picked out). I also bought a vest pattern for a new vest - called Tilling the Soil, it's a cabled vest and I really liked it, both for the appearance and the name. I also picked out the appropriate yarn for it - it's called Northern Lights and is a wool-silk blend. The color I chose is a grapey purple with blue flecks, which I expect will look good with khakis and black slacks and skirts and with jeans. (It is my Next Big Project; I plan to wind off the yarn tonight). I also wound up getting a kit of the Rosy-Fingered Dawn shawl, even though I'm rather ahead on shawl kits or yarns-and-patterns. (But there were only two left, and I don't know if they're making more).

My mother bought a sock kit - the one with the various pets that you can knit into it (she's going to make herself cat socks) and a vest pattern and some pale green yarn.

After we made our purchases, my father asked Anne (who, I take it, is one of the owners) if we could tour the mill. That was the really interesting part, as I had never seen a woolen mill.

The tour was cool, both because it was fun to learn how the yarns were produced, but because Anne also had that quiet, enthusiastic glow that a person gets when they're doing something they obviously love doing and are meant to do.

The operation is much smaller than I would have expected. It proceeds in several steps. First, the raw wool is washed and spread out to dry (they do custom spinning as well; she showed us some drying wool that was part of a custom run for a person who raised sheep). Next, the locks of wool are mechanically picked to open them (in handspinning I think this is called teasing).

From the pick closet (a room filled with fluffy clean open locks of wool; if I were a bit younger I would have been tempted to jump into it and try to make a wool-angel), the wool is fed into a giant carder. That's the biggest machine in the wool mill; it runs the wool through several combs that remove "crud" and also line up the fibers. At the end of the carder, the wool comes out in a series of ribbons. They look a lot like the unspun Icelandic wool, if you've seen that. (I suppose they are essentially the same thing). Next, the wool is actually spun. The wool they had on the mill for spinning was spun up very finely, like a cobweb weight. I don't know if all their single plies are that thin, or if this was a special order. I didn't think to ask. From there, the singles are plied into two, three, or four ply wool.
From the plying machine, the coned wool is either sold as is, hanked up and sold in natural colors, or hanked up and dyed. (Anne said that they didn't like to spin already-dyed wool; after a run of dyed wool it is necessary to break down the machines and clean them thoroughly, so they only do dyed wool once a year or so).
She said the dyepot was a steam kettle from a Chili's restaurant. There was some wool that had been dyed green (as I remember) hanging to dry, and also some handpainted wool.

She also showed us a book recording the different custom runs they did. The settings for the various machines were recorded (as well as some comments, I think one wool had "terrible, terribly messy" written by it) and a small sample of the resulting natural-colored yarn was included.

It was, as I said, really interesting. My father was interested too, and he's not a fiber person. I thought it was particularly cool, somehow it feels more meaningful and authentic to me to work with something when I know how it's been made and who made it.

I highly recommend making the side trip to Mt. Horeb to see the mill if you're ever in the Madison area. Just call first (they have the number up on the website and they are also in the Business White Pages in Madison), the man I talked to said they had been planning a carding run for that afternoon which would have made it too noisy to tour.

Mt. Horeb is also the home to the world's only mustard museum; we spent a few minutes there after getting lunch at a restaurant Anne recommended (Shubert's; it was good, they had homemade pasties - a type of Cornish meat pie).

Actually, there are a lot of cool places in southwest and southcentral Wisconsin; if we had had more time (and if I had not been nursing a near migraine probably brought on by the weather) we would have spent some time in New Glarus, which is a Swiss settlement.