A trip to the Fiber Mill

Last Tuesday morning, I was scrambling to get my last two fleeces washed along with the Coopworth fleece I bought at the Michigan Fiber Festival. I had made an appointment to go down to Ohio Valley Natural Fiber … the other fiber mill I use … on Thursday and bring my fleeces to be processed while I wait. But they have to be washed and dried!

Amid wind and rain, I was able to get them washed on the back porch. But how was I going to get these dried with all this humidity and no sun?! I brought all three into my studio / office and laid them out on screens. I turned on the air conditioner on high, both ceiling fans on high, and ran two portable fans. Amazingly they were dry by Thursday morning.

So I put all 12 bags of fleece in the car and headed down to Sardinia around 7am. It took about and hour and 20 minutes and I actually arrived just ahead of the employees, but Kent, the owner, was there to greet me. Kent is one of the funniest, eccentric, unassuming characters I’ve ever met. So he’s always a joy to see while I’m there. He and his wife Ginny have owned the mill for 20 years and do an incredible business. He said their backlog is out to next April for delivery! Thus taking the time to go down there is worth it!

First step is to weigh in each of the fleeces and assign them a number. Then decide which ones need to be picked. I want to pick any fleeces that are multi-colored so the color is even throughout. I also want to pick the fleece with the mohair I purchased so it will be well blended.

Then the fleeces are divided into white only and any with color. They have one carding machine for white fiber only so they don’t get polluted with color fibers.

At the picking machine, the fleece is laid out on a belt ... you can see the darker mohair and the white wool.

... and it rolls through some pretty hefty teeth to separate the fibers a little bit … nothing too fine yet...

Then it comes out into a screened room with a blower that blows the fibers all around the room to mix them together. Then someone goes in and scoops it back up and re-bags it and moves it over to the carding machine.

The carding machines are huge … probably 6 feet high and 12 feet long with lots of rollers with all different size teeth of varying densities. The wool gets tossed into a hopper and ...

then is fed up a belt with teeth just grabbing a little at a time. The belt at the back of the picture actually broke when I had 3 fleeces left, so they had to hand feed the wool in on the other side. It was not going to be a fun task to replace according to Kent.

Then it comes around and is dropped out of another hopper which feeds it through more teeth along another belt. Ya, it looks dirty and the machines can't help it if you consider you have to keep the gears oiled and then wool is constantly flying through the air. In fact the show Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe (he's doing Ford commercials for his summer job) came to Kent's mill and filmed a show in April. He thinks it's going to air in October. If I get a head's up, I'll let you know.

Now the wool gets fed little by little into a series of rollers with teeth. They comb out and separate the fibers and will also pull out some of the remaining vegetation that didn’t get hand-picked out by me.

and more rollers ... see the wisps of fibers starting to grab onto all the rollers?

here you can see a lot of it grabbing on...
... and then down the other side

After going through all these rollers, it comes out the other side in a strip of roving … a small tube-shape of combed wool … it would fit through a paper towel roll. This is what spinners feed into a spinning wheel to make yarn. Someone has to hand feed it into a box ... this is the only step that requires human intervention.

They have one more carding machine that feeds into a spinning machine. They didn't have it running, but it was loaded with wool, so I could see the path it traveled. Truly amazing that someone invented these machines. The wool is spun onto a long roll about 4 feet long. This is one ply yarn. If someone wants it made into 2- or 3-ply yarn, it goes through this machine below. In the very top right, you can see about 4 spools of dark yarn hung from the top. It has to be hand fed into the machine to get it set up, but then it will ply the yarn onto cones auto-magically. This mill requires at least 25 pounds of wool to make yarn and I barely get that in one shearing. The other mill I'm using for my yarn only requires a 3 pound minimum.
It was about noon when the belt on the carding machine broke, so Kent invited me in for lunch while they hand-fed the rest of the fleeces. I got a tour of their finished addition to the house. The house itself is an interesting tour. He has added a lot of interesting features ... many of them energy saving. He also had much of the wood work, doors and furniture hand crafted by an Amish gentleman.

While eating lunch a big thunderstorm went through, so I enjoyed lunch, the tour and the stories until it passed. I left about 1:30 with my clouds of wool ready for the hands of eager spinners at A Wool Gathering next month.