Vermont Craft and Cuisine - Day 5
Originally published at BlackTabi Blog. You can comment here or there.
Friday was our last day in Vermont, but we still had big plans for places to visit along our drive home! One of the most interesting stops on our trip was still to come - a tour of the Green Mountain Spinnery in Putney, Vermont. We still needed to drive a fair bit to get there from our hotel, so we needed to set off bright and early in anticipation of the tour. With this in mind, we found that we were able to have our daily breakfast that was included in our stay delivered to our rooms for a rather insignificant fee. They’ll bring coffee and delicious food right to your door? The weather is nice and cool for the first time all week? Why are we leaving?!
Oh, right. Yarn and spinning machinery. After a relaxing breakfast at the small table in our room, we checked out of the Essex and started toward the spinnery.
Green Mountain Spinnery
The spinnery processes american-grown fiber, using no chemicals and all vintage spinning equipment. We didn’t get to see much of the equipment in motion, but it was still fun to look at the machinery as we walked through the building.
Automatic card feed - I think that badge says 1951
After being washed and dried, the fibers come to this machine for carding:
Everything was coated in fuzz!
After carding, the fiber is separated into pencil roving and loaded on the machine belowfor spinning. I will admit, when I saw this machine all I could think of was the American Girl books and other reading I’d done where children of immigrant families worked in giant, unsafe factories. I think the machines we viewed were probably new enough that factories were safer and more humane by the time they were being used, but I didn’t work that out until later!
If you look closely, under each orange wheel you’ll see a small tube. When I asked whether the entire machine had to be shut down when I thread broke, they told me that these small tubes are actually vacuums. When a thread breaks, the two ends are sucked into the vacuum tube so that a machine attendant can see there’s a problem, grab the ends and tie them back together. Voila!
industrial spinning machine
Spun yarn is collected onto these cones to be steamed and wound off into the desired yarn units later.
plump yarn steamed to set the twist
Speaking of winding! The machine below takes the yarn from the cones and whirls it around a frame (seen at the bottom of the photo, pretty blurry because it’s spinning fast!) to set it up for putting into measured hanks. Sort of the opposite of a swift!
flying hank making machine!
Next, we got to tour the tiny shop at the spinnery. We bumbled around squeezing the yarn and bumping into each other, and generally having a grand time.
Tiny shop, but stuffed with great things!
We even picked up a few souvenirs!
After our tour of the mill, we continued along our route home with another delicious stop in mind. We stopped at Brattleboro, VT, with the hope of eating lunch on a deck beside the river and shopping for buttons and cloth at an established fabric store in the area. At first, it looked like this was not meant to be. The restaurant with the deck was undergoing renovations, and deck seating was no longer available! Luckily, they recommended The River View Cafe, another restaurant a few blocks away that also afforded a beautiful view of the river, along with delicious beverages and food. Much to our dismay, they were out of zucchini cakes, but we were still able to find plenty of delicious food. We split a beet and goat cheese salad, tried some gourmet sodas. Based on rave reviews of their pesto, Matt had a pesto pizza and I enjoyed a pesto dish all the more for this view:
taken with my iPhone because I'd left my camera in the car
After lunch, our group split up for a bit. The other crafty types and I headed for Delectable Mountain Cloth - a shop specializing in vintage buttons and high quality fabrics. We all spent a good deal of time pouring over the button collection, chatting with the owner, and admiring the fabrics. She told us that she has one of the most extensive collections of white fabrics available, so definitely look them up the next time you need a specific white or a specially colored silk!
Finally, I rounded out my afternoon by picking up a maple latte from a local coffee shop, and meeting the group at the coop down the street where we were able to purchase local snacks and cheeses to take home as souvenirs. Matt and I picked up a block of cheese from Shelburne Farms (which we’d toured earlier in the week!) and pretended that it just might be one of the blocks of cheddar we’d seen being produced!
After our final stop, it was back to Boston with one last perk of a small-group tour. Alanna agreed to drop everyone off at the front porch or train station of their choosing so we didn’t need to worry as much about packing everything just so on the way home so we’d be able to carry it all home on the train. We bid our dwindling party goodbye, as we were the last people to be dropped off at our house.
Over all, a good trip! (and the cats were very happy to see us.)