Wellington Fibres: Virtual Tour of the Woolen Mill

The first of two large rooms is the storefront, filled with roving, yarns, and boxes securely storing wool. The high ceilings provide a welcome, sunlit, airy space, while the floors are decorated with Ashford looms, spinning wheels, and mannequins bedecked in garments knitted or woven from the mill’s yarn. Navigating through the storefront is not difficult, only requiring enough care in your step to appreciate the product as you pass by.

A door in the wall provides access to the larger of the two rooms. Within is the sound of hot water flowing and the whir of machinery. To the left of the door is a larger container, the water inside kept hot by solar heating. Donna tells you about the solar panels on the roof, and how they provide most of the power to run the machinery in the mill. The sinks along the left side of the wall are full of water, with wool weighed and organized, securely tucked into lingerie bags. The precious heated water is conserved by soaking the dirtiest wool bundles in used water, before being moved to a fresh bath that removes the remainder of the oils and dirt. Between baths the bundles are all placed inside a repurposed laundromat machine, which spins out the remaining water.

After the wool is washed it is dried on a rack. It then passes through the first of many fantastical devices: the picker. A conveyor belt steadily feeds the wool into a series rotating cylinders that have metal teeth poking out of them. They pull the fibres apart and launch them along an enclosed belt into a small wood-walled room. Inside this room it is difficult to tell if the contents are wool or clouds. The soft white fluffy mass on the floor of the wood-walled room beckons you to touch it, but then the door is closed. The cloud is sealed away from airborne contaminants, and the next machine is before you.

This machine is familiar to most fibre artists, although this particular drum carder is a mighty beast. The main drum has the diameter of a small mannequin’s torso, rotating diligently in a cage meant to protect visitors instead of the great beast itself. Once again wool is fed in on a belt, evenly spread out to control how colours mix. The carded wool emerges as a floating layer of cloud-stuff, falling down into a rotating bucket that applies a gentle amount of twist. This twist keeps the cloud-sheets of wool organized as it awaits drafting.

The machines thus far have lined the side and back walls of the mill, but the next few are in the centre of the room. Before approaching the drafting machine, a set of shelves on the right distracts you with its contents. Two lines of beautifully drafted and coiled cylinders of roving greet you. The black fibres have a lustre to them, and your curiosity is piqued. The back roving is a mohair blend, a mix of 70% off-site wool and 30% on-site mohair. You learn that these twelve cylinders are awaiting their turn to be spun into yarn as part of a commission, and turn your attention back to the drafting machine. 

Buckets full of carded wool rest at your feet, slowly being fed into the machine and stretched by grooved discs. It has mirrors on the far side so the exiting fibres can be constantly checked for consistency. They fall into another rotating platform, and are carefully laid into the same cylinder shape as the black mohair blend behind you.

The fate of this purple, blue and green draft is to be spun. In the centre of the room rests the spinning machine. The drafted roving is fed in from a table, going up and over top of a metal rack like vines growing over a trellis. In the bowels of the machine a complex feed of interwoven belts powers rolling cylinders and spindles to incorporate the first twist into the wool. The gauge can be adjusted by moving the distances between the cylinders, although the adjustments are made efficiently in order to save time and energy.

 …. The spindles are then brought to another machine to be plied…

This plying machine feeds the yarn from single spun spindles downwards and through more cylinders onto a second larger spindle. The yarn tumbles down like snow from a mountaintop. One of the tricks that Donna has learned is how to use the cylinders to unbalance a third ply to create boucle yarn. Plied yarns are wound onto skeins, their twist set, and are prepared to be put in the shop.

Yarn can be dyed before or after it is spun. The acid dyes used at Wellington Fibres conserve on water, and do not bind to it so there’s no toxic wastewater created in the process. The dye kitchen is spread along the wall with the door you entered from. The dye supplies are located close to the plyer, and the vat near the sinks and water supply. The giant vessel can contain three stew pots, allowing multiple colours to be created at once. In-house colours will be placed in previously used dye baths to conserve water, slowly working from light to darker colours.

As you prepare to depart, you think that this realm of woolly magic is one that was meant for visiting. The memories seem certain to come back again and again. You leave, watching the quiet wonder of three buildings disappear into the distance.