Nothin' Wrong with Yesteryear....

A good woolen mill is at the heart of what I create. If I don't have access to the high quality milling that transforms wool from the sheep's backs into beautiful roving as I know it, I wouldn't be able to create the exquisite fabrics, wearables and wall art I do. It's important that there are local mills transforming local fibers into a product that we can work with. It takes many steps to be able to get the roving I work with; a mill helps to complete this circle. 

Our main mill is Zeilinger Mill  in Frankenmuth, MI and they too are over a century old. I haven't made it up to see the folks there that transform our sheep's wool into beautiful roving, so stumbling upon this wool mill was the closest to seeing some antique milling equipment that I've been. 

The wool has to be washed (scoured) and then dried. It then goes through a picker, a machine that fluffs it up in preparation to be carded. The video above shows picked wool getting run through the carder, and then being made into a large quilt batt. They can also run it through a drafter at the end to thin that batt into the strips of roving we use called roving. Once back from the mill, I do the dyeing and blending for my art and for customers at Esther's Place . 

The thing that astonished me the most was how beautifully this beastly machine ran. Though it looks like a hundred tiny parts cobbled together and all running in chaotic rhythm, it has a smooth peacefulness to it, at the same time. Slow and steady, it runs on the same principles that have kept it running for over a hundred-fifty years. The outside world has changed around it; cars got faster and more fuel efficient; telecommunications got clearer and more sophisticated; computers can now reside on our wrists and run our lives, more or less. While the pandemonium of technological advancement gained momentum around it, this machine kept making; kept doing what it was invented to do. 

Sometimes there was nothin' wrong with yesteryear. While our world demands things instantly, can we find a beauty in the slower, steady pace of times long forgotten? Watching the rhythm of monotony, it can lull us into a place 150 years old, a place that is productive in a simple yet complex manner. How I love the machines of yesteryear! Their nostalgia never ceases to charm me. 

A Custom Blend...

While researching Cedarburg, I really thought I remembered running across something about a working 19th century wool mill. Yet in this wonderful, techno-age we live in, things poof in and out of cyber connection like a dandelion seed drifting on the wind..... they are here one moment and gone the next. We click, click, click and suddenly we are light-years away from where we started, and in a galaxy far, far away. 

So upon arriving in Cedarburg, I began asking around for this "wool mill". I got blank stares, and people suggested a gallery that had a lady who spun yarn on a spinning wheel, or the Cedar Creek Settlement,  a shopping complex housed in a old yarn mill. Both were intriguing but not quite what I had in mind. Was I crazy? Was this mill a fabrication of my imagination? Wishful thinking? Now I was beginning to wonder (and my husband as well, though he did know I was a bit crazy and married me anyways...) 

Before leaving town, we stopped in one last gallery, The Pink Llama,  and while browsing, came upon a little alcove with a sign hanging, that read "Cedarburg Woolen Mill and Textile Museum". The little open sign slung on the banister of some very steep, old stairs, beckoned with a mysterious allure.  The gallery volunteer indicated that we were lucky, there was someone working the mill today and that we could go check it out. 

Descending the stairs, I felt like I was being transported to another time, and another place. I certainly traveled 150 years in that flight of steps, and in the short ceilings and dim lights of a basement work room, I could make out a glorious beast of a machine; the woolen mill I was in search of!