Picking Up My Wool At Nobletown Fiber Works

I was nervous, I’m always nervous when I pick up my wool.  But this time I was especially nervous because it was my first time getting yarn and roving back from  Nobletown Fiber Works.

But I relaxed as soon as Jon and I stepped through the door and Lewis waved his hand telling us to come in.

Look, he said, it’s the last of Robins wool being spun.

And there  was Robins soft and fluffy wool, being fed into a big machine, coming out of a pipe on the other side in a thick rope of yarn and being wound into a bump.

I had just enough time to take a short video before it was all done. I’d never seen how the spinning machines work before, so it was a treat.

In the next room my yarn and roving was piled on the table.

As soon as I saw it all my worries faded.

There were three very different colors of yarn from Merricat’s white to Constance’s soft gray to Issachar’s dark brown. There were three plus bumps of Robin’s, thick twisted rug yarn and bags of brown and white roving from Kim, Asher and Lori.

Both Lewis and Mickey, who works with Lewis, explained the difficulty of processing the wool that had  small conical shaped,  velcro-like seeds in it.  I didn’t realize how many of them there were in the wool.   I try to get them out when I’m skirting my wool, but there were more than I thought.

Mickey suggested clearing the pasture of the plant they come from.

The seeds come from a plant called Agrimoina Eupatoria.  It’s a small plant with a spike of little yellow flowers on it.

I think it would be easier to get rid of the plant in the north pasture (and keep the sheep out of the back pasture until it’s mowed)  than to have to pick it out of all the sheep wool. I did that with Burdock and it never came back.

We also talked about what we might do next year.

Lewis spun  a small skein of Merricat and Constances wool into a barber pole and it looks really beautiful, like silvery snow.  I may also shear Asher and Issachar twice a year instead of only once.   As long as their wool is 2 1/2 inches long it can be made into roving.

We also met Lewis’s two new dogs, Emma and Poppy,  who had belonged to his father.  Emma said hello to us both then spent the rest of the time sleeping, while the shitzu Poppy made the round again and again.

Mickey told me about a way of dying yarn and fabric in the snow (I’m going to look into that).   And Lewis gave me the information that I’ll be able to pass along about how to use Robins Wool to knit into a rug.

Mostly I got the feeling that Lewis really cares about the work he’s doing. He started the mill three years ago and splits his time between it and being a Broadway Actor.  Today I saw once again how dedicated and knowledgable he is about wool and that he loves working with it.

Both he and Mickey knew the names of all my sheep and what their wool was like.  Mickey said that Kim’s was the softest Karakul wool she’d ever felt.  And Lewis said that all the sheep had unusually soft wool.

We agreed that it is probably due to the hay we feed them, which is grown without fertilizer.

Lewis and Mickey patiently answered all my questions and I was so relaxed with them both I know when I pick up next years wool I won’t be nervous at all.

I’m already thinking of what I want to do differently with this springs wool.  And I made plans with Lewis to drop it off in June.

It’s going to take me a couple of days to sort out the wool and get it ready to be sold.  I’ll be getting in touch with the people on my list first then be selling the rest in my Etsy Shop.

You can see more pictures of Nobletown Fiber Works and our afternoon picking up wool on Jon’s blog.