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!