Pictures!

The Green Mountain Spinnery in Putney, Vermont. My husband wondered how I could spend an hour in a place the "size of a closet". It was so cool to watch the yarn being spun (from washing the raw fleece to counting off skeins)! We really lucked out to get a tour.

Here's the rundown: They wash the raw wool and feed it into the picker to start fluffing it up and separating the fibers (they often do this more than once per batch). Then it goes through the rollers of the carding machine. After it is carded it's sort of one big "sheet". Then the sheet is cut into strands of roving. The roving is wound onto huge spools and three strands of roving are spun (i.e. twisted) together to produce a single ply of yarn. The spinning maching winds the plys onto spindles and then they are steamed to set the twist. The final picture is a woman taking yarn from the spindles and winding them onto a giant swift (bottom of picture, under spindles) to create skeins. Any questions? There will be a test on Tuesday. *Okay, not really. That's the teacher in me coming out. *grin*

EDIT: Theses pictures were making the rest of my blog take a loooong time to load, so I pulled them off. You can still see them at these links: fleece, carder, carded, roving, spools, skeining, steamed.