When I went to the Green Mountain Spinnery

Last month I went to Vermont. My father had a work retreat. After the meeting, we wandered around for a couple of days and explored Vermont. It was nice. One of the places we visited was the Green Mountain Spinnery in Putney.

When we got there, before we went in there was a big truck with bags and bags of fleeces.

When I first walked in there was a little yarn shop. On the right was a doorway. Through it I could see a large room with machines. One of the workers invited me in and gave me a tour of the spinnery.

The first machine was a carder. It was more like a drum carder than hand carders. It was almost as long as the entire building. It had lots and lots of gears and wheels and large rollers with spikes. At the end of the carder, lots of pencil roving came out.

Next the wool was taken to the spinning machine. This machine was also large, but not as large as the carder. On top of the machine were huge metal and wood spools of the pencil roving. This machine had lots of bobbins. One woman ran 24 at once. We got to see the machine work.

The bobbins were taken to a plying machine. 24 bobbins of spun yarn were plied onto 12 bobbins all at once.


Finally, a third woman ran a machine that made skeins. It could wind 12 skeins all at once.


When I left, one of the workers gave me a small skein of yarn that she had just spun and taken off to weigh. I bought a second mini-skein to match it. I plan to ply them using my Mama's spinning wheel.