There was a Romney Related Incident.

Hey, get your boots. I have a hookup on local wool. All good adventures start with those words. In this case I’d only known Danielle a couple months in person, but I figured who better to bring with me than this person who kept showing up at the yarn shop. And we needed wool. Clearly.

Boots on, we headed out to the quintessential northwest farm.

Feet of mud, happy sheep in shelters, and spectacular fleece in barrels waiting for us to grade it. Every good adventure starts with a truckful of fleece after all. Ok actually we had a station wagon. We also had a 4 year old with us. But those minor details never stopped us before. Wool smashes. And these experiences for a child is educational. On so many levels.

We sorted, we graded, and once we had station wagon stuffed full we stopped. There was a long discussion on whether or not it was safe to put more on the top. But we eventually decided not. After lunch in a wool infused fog, we had to figure out what to do with it all. Because no matter how lovely the fleece is, neither of us wanted to hand process most of it. Ok, that’s not true.

Wool fumes give you delusions of grandeur. They make you believe that you can sit down like Rumplestiltskin and spin your fleece into gold. Come to think of it, he hired that job out. In any case Danielle told me that she was going to hand comb, and spindle herself a coat. Spindle. Not wheel spin. Someday. She had this perfect Border Leicester fleece. Spoiler alert: It’s been 95 years since she told me that. But there’s still a lot of somedays. I’m not sure she still has that fleece but I bet we have one just like it in a bucket somewhere. In any case though, in this story, this mountain of fleece needed to be processed. No one really has time to spin all the fleece, and while some love processing it is not my first love – Or Danielle’s. Plus we buy a LOT of fleece. Over the years the Romney Related Incidents have gotten larger, not smaller. We have a trailer not a station wagon now. So off to the mill we went.

Mills, are a whole weird world in their own right. There are good mills, bad mills, dirty mills, clean mills, fast mills and slow mills. All are busy, and all make yarn out of the fleece we hoard. But finding the right mill is a lot like dating. You first approach the one that looks cute. You find out all their good points. They wine and dine you, or they ghost you because they’re already seeing too many people. Of course that’s always the one you really want, that one who is the homecoming queen or star of the football team. But when you’re starting out you end up with hopefully someone nice. You know, the person who might be a runner up.

But then, after those first dates the personalities come out. The ones who really don’t care, who will make you always pay for dinner. The ones who say they’re amazing at fixing things but in reality break everything. Or worst, the ghosters who you just never hear from as they keep your product forever.

Early on, we went through it all, in the quest for perfect yarn and fiber. Relationships started out great only to crash. Bills skyrocketed as we got hit with obscure fees. And product that started out great turned out mediocre.

We tried big mills, little mills, near and far. We dated a lot of producers.

Meanwhile the romney related incidents just kept happening. Is there such a thing as too much fleece? Don’t ask our families. Or our landlord.