me and my camera

What a week.  First, I kept forgetting to ask Brigid for the camera.  Then I took it to the mill and forgot to bring it home.  I am really behind on photos. 

It was a tiring week.  The school play just takes it out of everyone and this year I volunteered all four nights after being at the mill. 

We made yarn this week.  We made rovings.  We made rug yarn.  We played with some new things.  We got more orders, which is very exciting.  We learned new things about our machines (and we keep making the mistake of thinking there are no new things to learn right now...)

Craig made a trip to deliver some yarn as well as pick up some fleeces from a friend.  He must have come back with close to 200 pounds of fiber!  This friend has graciously let us go thru the fleeces to see which ones we would like to process.  Her blankets are beautiful and we had such a good time sorting the different colors.  We have not gone thru the boxes of seconds yet.  We are buying the fleeces from her as well as trading some processing for product. 

More machines have been named this week as well.  You all know Eeyore, the pindrafter and have heard about Luigi, the sleek Italian spinner.  The tumbling room is PigPen (and boy was it today!).  The 8 head spinner is Moirae, after all three of the Greek fates.  Clotho spun the yarn or a person's life, Lachesis measured out the length of yarn / life span, and Atropos cut the thread (ending your life).  There were individuals who were rumored to have such strong life threads that they actually frayed those around them (aka Julius Caesar). 

We do have some product - yarn, rug yarn, and rovings - in the 84 Alpacas at Linwood Farms store as well as at Backstage Alpacas in Bedford, PA.  When we finish with our current orders, assuming there is some down time, we will get back to makign more product.  This is something we hope to make time for monthly. 

Here are some pictures from the week:

Cow Paca fleece

Fleece poofs for everyone!

Eeyore sitting on eeyore's
set of combs (all 66 bars of them!)



Garbo-licious peachy roving and yarn

 

Moira - needle felted by Brigid



Fiber and Plays

It has been a busy week, both at work and outside of it. 

Wed we did two different fibers.  One was a courser white than we are used to dealing with (fines, we have much more experience with thanks to Craig and Bill's excellent fiber) and the other was a gorgeous peachy beige.  I have not been doing much handspinning recently but the color and sheen on Garbo's fleece made me positively drool and wonder where my wheel is hiding. 

Fri was a day to look at the skeins we have produced and tag the good stuff to sell in the store. 

Yesterday we had a good day - we ran 8 pounds completely in good time with good results. 

A month ago there were days it didn't seem we would be getting it but time and experience really does kick in. 

Personally, the musical started on Thurs and ends today.  Both my girls are in the play.  And there is a need for lots of parental volunteer hours.  I have been going up every night to help out.  Today is the last day, so things will hopefully get back to normal now. 

I will add some pictures in a bit.  The camera is in the play bad somewhere. 

Where did that storm come from?

Wow.  We were in the path of some bad weather yesterday.  Now, having had one child down with the flu and having gotten a mild case myself (which annoys me in that I hadn't been sick in something like 8 years), I was not watching the weather.  So when Craig said yesterday "Hey, we are supposed to get 3-6" of snow later" I thought, really?  Ok.  We had a good day in the yarn department, working with blacks again.  We did both 2 and 3 plys of a DK/Sport weight. 

The weather report only got worse when I got home.  First 4-7" then 5-8".  The kids were released from play early and there was no school today. 

So we took today off.  Craig had a dentist appt mid day and the kids needed to go to play practice at 1 pm.  We will hit it again tomorrow, going back to whites.  We have some fawn as well.

The website is getting better (I hope) but the flu did put a kabosh in my plans to work on it a lot on Sat.

Eeyore has his original parts back and we can pick up the newly machined parts soon, to get the other side working (Eeyore has a split personality! He is supposed to be able to feed two groups of rovings into two sliver cans at one time). 

I did not get any good px yesterday of our yarn.  I do have some of the white we did at the end of  last week for a friend of Craig's.

We were down Fri and Sat as I was the girl scout cookie mom and we decided to take poor Eeyore apart as it was too opportune to miss.  So not much to report from Fri - Sun.

Boa constrictor rovings...

become beautiful prin drafted rovings...



become 3 ply worsted.



If you like snow px, here is one I took for M in
SC this morning.  She loves snow px.
Weather channel says we got 6.7" last night.
Claire, the doxie, says it was too much!

Website is up, kind of

Hi there.  Not much going on.  We did marketing stuff on Fri and Craig was at a knitters and crocheters event on Sat, while Tim and I did some work at the mill that was not about yarn (you know, cleaning and machine maintenance). 

My big "waste" of time was trying to get the website up and running.  Rob, who designed the website and did a very nice job, used Dreamweaver to create.  But that apparently is not a direct way to launch a site.  So TIm fixed me up with a content mamangement system that is supposed to be good.  I would love to report that it is but after 10 hours of fighting it on Sun and additional hours on Mon, my opinion is not terrific.  I am going to keep trying to work it out but in the meantime, flipped to using a much easier template system on line.

I got a basic site up last night.  you can even look at it.  But you still can not print an order form or anything.  Hopefully, tonight.  And we have a phone now but for two days, we have forgotten to bring anything to try plugging into it!  So I will take phones today and see.  Don;t get overly excited.  You might be able to find us there and we may just have to return calls later.  Since we do not have a secretary, most of our time is still spent at the machines.  Also, I am assuming that the number they said was ours really is our but that remains to be seen.  Tim says it is not uncommon to be told one number then find out, Oops. 

If you are curious, go ahead and check out http://84alpacasfibermill.com/ .  Book mark it so you know where it is.  Keep watching for new stuff.  The kids are in the push weeks for play so they are not home from school prior to 9 pm and I have time to work on it.

And with any luck, I can figure out the other system adn Rob and I can get his version up soon.

Cold hopefully gone

We had three 2 hour delays this week:  2 for cold and one for ice/snow.  Today, we are all on schedule.

Yesterday went well.  It didn't seem that way to Craig for part of the day.  He was workign with the spinner and not having a good time of it.  We all just need one day where we tackle the beast and then all is well.  Yesterday was his day.

I was not hopeful that the end product would be great.  I was predicting lots of boucling with the wash.  But I was very and pleasantly surprised.  It did not.  We made a two ply and a three ply version of the yarn and both are beautiful.  Very soft, no boucle, good twist angle.  The top two skeins are 3 ply and the bottom two 2 ply.   Middle two skeins washed.

Today we go back to browns and blacks. 

Snow then cold

I hope that Phil got his weather prediction right and we are in for an early spring.  Tues delay was for icy roads and snow, todays for really cold cold.  And it is hard to gear up, tell the girls to get up alone, and head to the mill when it is really cold out!  Even harder to get Claire moving in the cold.

Mon was one of those learning experience days that I could have done without.  We were both kind of draggy then things were not going right.  We blamed the usual suspects:  cohesive spray, humidity, fiber.  Well, about 6 hours later the real culprit reared its head.  I know the answer to this without it taking 6 hours.  But, again, we were draggy.  The first choice when looking for a finger to point should and is: operator error.

Yes, things are backwards at the mill.  More is less and up is down and higher is lower.  But folks, on is always on and off is always off.  And, Virginia, the air compressor on the pin drafter does actually do something.....(for Virginia, read Barb). 

Once I got that switch flipped to the correct position, we made some lovely black yarn.  And yesterday, even with the school delay, we got through about 4.5 to 5 lbs of fiber (from start to finish) in about 4 hours.  WHOO HOO!  We are makign great product and getting the timing down we need.  We were working with a grey fleece yesterday.  Not that we have run the gammit on colors but we have done white, fawn, brown, black and grey. 

Still working on getting website up and running.  It has been a while since I have done this and the webmaster, well, he is learning as well.  So be patient.  Good news - the phone company is supposed to come and hook us up today, which makes finding us oh so much easier!

here are some px:

100 yards rug yarn,
100 yards fingering



Jen's greys from Feb 8



Knit rug yarn, about 12" square

Wash day

Three yarns from last week

What a good yarn day it was

Today was a really, really good yarn day.  The fiber was beautiful for starters.  And I got over my fear of thin, seemingly weak (but not) rovings.  I made them much thinner and what do you know, they held together at the spinner.

The photos are not going to show the color well.  The fleece was a black alpaca.  The close up photo shows the color fairly well, unlike the gang shot.

Twenty 100 yard skeins

Close up (and truer color)
of today's product

I was weaving rugs mid-week.  This is the sample with Craig's prototype multi-color rug yarn.  I thought if we could do different color in the yarn, it would make for interesting rugs (without having to change shuttles or colors all the time, kind of like self striping sock yarn).  It is about 25" x 27" inches.  I did not use the entire bump of rug yarn (I wanted grey on both ends, not grey on one end and white on the other). 

We are taking tomorrow off, because, well, we can and we should.  And we will probabyl all watch the Superbowl, amybe even together.