Saturday, July 26, 2008

Quick post about lemons and volleyball

I turned lemons into lemonade :) Knowing that I was travelling to Courtenay for a weekend of hubby's beach volleyball refereeing, I took an opportunity to drop off my washed fleece to Qualicum Bay Fibre Works! (this was one bag of 5 that we were processing by hand for the James Bay Child Care Society!) I loked up a number of 'stops' along our route ie goat farms, yarn shops, QBFW... I timed it perfectly to make for a nice little stretch break for the 3yr old and that way hubby couldn't pooh-pooh the idea...Plus being it was going to be a volleyball intense weekend - hubby wasn't going to tell me no!!!

What a cool place! Anna is so friendly and welcoming, she gave us the tour of her process, her machines, and showed us what each machine does! I'm amazed at how these 'ancient' machines can do even today! Although Anna does what one would call 'small batches' it certainly is a productive little operation from my point of view! The carder is the oldest machine and it was just pumping out the most gorgeous white roving into large buckets. These rovings either went to the customer or went through the pin-draft machine to have the fibres more aligned and also take up less space for shipping! I opted to go for the pin drafted stage - save me some space, and since this is all new to me - I figure the more in line the fibres are, the less 'mess' I'll make attempting to spin them for the first time!! The pin drafting machine will also combine fibres, which looked really neat - but not being a spinner (yet), I didn't want to venture a guess at how that turns out.

There is also a spinning machine where she can spin the fibres into yarn/ply the yarns... I was sorely tempted to have this wonderful fleece spun FOR me to knit kilt socks, but decided that I do need to attempt to use my spinning wheel and what better incentive than to have lovely pindrafted fleece to spin at the daycare for the children to fondle before we knit them animals and dolls!?

Anna also introduced us to the animals, including a chicken that lays green eggs!

Now I'm all excited and thinking I should get more fleeces up to Anna and then I CAN get some kilt sock yarn spun up for me!

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