The people at MacAusland are very nice and helpful. Like I said, I did not
want to give contact info before laying out the issues. It is a big, old,
dark, dusty, noisy place that smells of sheep and spinning oil. Equipment
is powered by leather belts running to rotating shafts running along the
ceilings. They allow visitors to look around the operating mill, which makes
the place more interesting than the museum at Lowell, Mass. However, with
their rotating equipment, I would not take a child into MacAusland's. The
most advanced electronics that I saw in the building was the dial telephone.
Orders are written up by hand, weighed on a scale, added up on pencil and
paper. It is a slice of a bygone time. For that, the mill is worth a visit.

I watched them bring up another dye lot of "burgundy". It was so different
that they would have had to change the photo on the web site. DW did not
like the old burgundy color that they had on the shelves when we walked in,
but DW did like the new burgundy and she made me buy 10 skeins of the new
burgundy. Looks like her sweater will be burgundy G. I would buy their
naturals by mail order, no problem, but maybe not the dyed colors. You can
touch and feel the yarns at a large number of woolen outlets across the
Atlantic Providences, but by then the price is $5 - $7/ skein which puts it
up in the price range of other yarns. So, plan a vacation to PEI, visit the
two mills, buy some yarn, and save some money.

In contrast, Belfast minimill is bright, clean, and quiet. Every piece of
equipment has enough computing power to be the envy of NASA.

Aaron

wrote in message
oups.com...
On Jul 12, 5:19 pm, "Aaron Lewis" wrote:

http://www.peisland.com/wool/
Not a very buyer-friendly website - not even a swatch card to give us
some idea of the colors.

The place for refined yarns is Belfast Mini Mills on PEI ( www.
minimills.net).

Nice stuff indeed. It's too bad we can no longer order qiviut-blend
yarn from them. Now that I made my bedsocks I'd rather make a shawl
but the "retail" outlets for the stuff now that it's popular thanks to
the Arctic Lace book have priced qiviut-blend yarn out of my
checkbook.

would send it. I should add, that one mini mill that Belfast sold to an
Alpaca breeder outside of Lunenburg is having serious problems with
static,
so while the technology is wonderful, the skill of the spinster counts.

It may be the owner of that mill doesn't have it grounded. A friend
here in town who has a Cottage Industry carder (7-drum, no roving
accumulator unfortunately) was having a horrid time with static until
I asked her if she had grounded the thing. Her answer was "huh?" so I
grounded it for her with a length of copper wire attached to the water
faucet and PRESTO, the static went away.


* In the basement of the Artists Coop is a small museum. There they had
two
wool spinning wheels - great wheels with spindles. However, both
spindles
had orifices, and looked like they had originally had fliers on them and
big
bobbins for winding large cones. Is there any way to use an orifice in a
spindle without a flier?

I can't see the utility of putting a flyer shaft (the bit with the
orifice) on a great wheel. All you'd accomplish thereby would be the
twitsting of the fiber, and then how do you wind it on? Some walking
wheels were equipped with flyers for whatever reason though again
there's that whole "where's the point?" thing; after all, one needs to
move the yarn from hook to hook periodically and THAT messes up the
rhythm of things. Maybe the spinster tasked a small child to spinning
the wheel while the spinster did the drafting and moving of the yarn
from one flyer hook to the next...

Aaron