19 November 2007

Busy weekend

We kept ourselves quite busy and on the move this weekend! Since the public schools weren't in session on Friday for parent-teacher conferences, we decided to pass over our usual library for our Friday library trip. It is a very small library and when school isn't in session, it can get pretty chaotic. Instead, we went to a branch with a bigger children's area. Since we didn't get our big ol' stack of holds for the week, Kitty Daddy set out early on Saturday to take our old computer monitor in to be recycled and then picked up our holds and some books for himself at our regular branch. We completed a library trifecta on Saturday afternoon when we met some friends at the Monona library for Tellabration.

Our big event for Sunday was visiting the Blackberry Ridge Woolen Mills. They had an open house, with tours of the mill, which was pretty cool. Blackberry Ridge has their own line of yarn, which comes to the mill as bales (about 700 lbs) of wool from a flock of sheep in South Dakota. They card, spin, ply, and dye (except, of course, their natural colored yarns) all the yarn that they sell from this wool, including some very pretty hand painted yarn! They also do custom milling for folks that have fleece that needs to be turned into roving or yarn. I think by now we have seen most of the possible routes a bit of fluff can take from critter to finished object. We have seen sheep being sheared, an alpaca show, and seen sheep on farms both to the north and to the south. The kidlings have seen me spin with a drop spindle and knit, and we have seen knitting machines, drum carders, and spinning wheels demonstrated at some of the fiber events we have gone to. The only thing that we have missed for the past two years is the lambing at A-Z farm. We will have to make a point of getting there this spring!

4 comments:

Marianne said...

Oh dude! You're in driving distance to the Blackberry Ridge place? Lucky... oooo, lucky!
I do, quite frequently, go to that website and just dream away... such pretty yarns and patterns... wow. so.... did something come home with you?

Your kids are so lucky, how's about adopting me..... :^)

Alison said...

Ah, you knit and spend your weekends at libraries. Just my kind of person. Of course, I'm at libraries 5 days a week, so try to stay away on weekends, but still. I love to hear stories about people using public libraries!

Anonymous said...

It interested me when you told me on the phone that the wool for Blackberry Ridge Woolen Mills comes from South Dakota (our home state)...left me wondering what part of the state those sheepses are from...

dale-harriet said...

Aren't we JUST in a terrific place, though! I've enjoyed reading your posts since our "introduction" via Chocolate Sheep, and hope we can lure you to the Sow's Ear soon! (The Hog-and-Blog Society is interested in expanding to include all fellow bloggers - and as Chocolate Sheep noted, "local" is "anyone who can get here"..... Which is your favorite library?