A truly rustic yarn, made in a small scale production, is so wholesome it resonates history with each stitch. In a bygone era yarn was made for the locals, from the local sheep, with woolen mills scattered along rivers, because at one time before the use of electricity it was the power of water which drove the machinery. Those ancient days are gone now, but there are still a few yarn mills today, making yarn with very old machinery, in small batches.
In small scale production, a whole fleece off-the-sheep, in its entirety, would be carded and blended, often with no ‘skirting’, and with all the varying shades a natural fleece can have, resulting in each batch being very individual, and creating what I call a rustic yarn. Today there are still a few old mills standing , where the end result of making yarn is nearly as it was done on the small holding farms. I might add how nice these small scale boutique mills are for the Indie Designer who wishes to produce a personal line of yarn to sell and with which to prototype their designs, and I am observing a growing number of such designers who are doing this that it seems to have become the fashionable In Thing.
This of course all is leading up to a Mill Tour, with a short film I recently discovered, about one of those few old mills still standing, Cushendale Woolen Mills, in Ireland…
I just love these films of old mills. Evidently I have begun to collect quite a few, so have created a category on Yarnings called “Mill Tours”, so click HERE to peruse them all ~~~ I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.
Jenjoyce Design 