This weekend was the annual open house at Wellington Fibres, near Elora Ontario. After a few emails, K. and Rob, and Lori and Mark and the kids decided they would make the trip and we'd meet up.
I like open house at the mill, largely because I like the mill --I've never met a wool mill I didn't like, come to think of it-- and because Donna and Lorne do great work. (And they raise angora goats, which is the animal that gives us mohair.) I hunted up the small Shetland fleece I got at Rhinebeck a couple of years back and took it down to be carded into roving.
I saw the goats. Most of the babes had been born.
In the mill, they were making "Mystery Rovings". What happens is that over a period of time mills end up with odds bits of fiber. You know: there's a couple of ounces of this, and bit of that, and some green wool leftover from that run of laceweight a coupla months ago. It's good stuff -- or it should be -- but there isn't enough of any one thing to do anything with. (Rather like how knitters end up with ends of balls of yarn and wonder what to do with it.) So, they take these ends and run them through the carder to make "mystery roving". It's called that because it's a mystery what the fiber will be in any given length of the roving. Wellington Fibre lists the content as "protein fibre", so we know it comes from an animal and it will likely be wools, alpaca, llama, mohair, silk, dog fluff. Other mills will have their own fiber content.
The bits are put on the feed belt at the back of the carder. (The shiny blue stuff is dyed mohair locks.)
The carder does its bit. Here's the front end of the machine. At the bottom of the picture you can see a shiny roller which is taking the fiber off the big drum (that's called "doffing") and underneath that you can just see the very fine web of fibre...
which is shunted down a funnel, forming roving. It falls into a bin at the front of the carder.
Lengths of the roving can be put through another machine which will combine them (an opportunity to blend colours, or maybe layer in a different fiber type: depends what you're doing). In this case, 3 lengths are fed into the back of the machine to be blended...
and stretched out a little bit, passing down through another funnel (the bit that looks like a blue dish at bottom right of this photo) into a storage container at the front.
And this is a pile of the finished roving.
Mystery Rovings can be lots of fun to spin: the colours change constantly along the length, and you can feel the differences in the texture and quality of the fiber as well.
In Other News
With all the changes going on in the company, it was a bit iffy whether I'd get my desired vacation dates, but they have been approved. (Higher levels of management can still revoke them, so fingers are crossed.) This means I am 95.67832145% sure that I am attending the Men's Spring Knitting Retreat. I volunteered to lead 2 workshops; one is on spindle spinning; the other is a nifty techie class on Combined Knitting, which I think every knitter should understand. (Where exactly is the back of the stitch, anyway?) I've always resisted teaching spindle spinning since I don't think I'm a good spinner, but there is this tradition thing out there that every spinner should teach someone else how to spin. So I should be meeting my karmic obligation to the spinning realm. Or whoever.
Also, in early June I am heading down to Champaign-Urbana in IL for the wedding celebration of my friends Dirk and Jerry. Plans are not yet firmed up, other than that I will be hanging out a bit at Needleworks.
That's it for now. See you later.