It was the answer to a knitter's dream today. A tour of a yarn factory. There were a couple of American knitwear designers at the Alafoss Factory Outlet at the same time I was who were going to get a tour. They let Tom and me join them. Alafoss is an Icelandic company that makes the traditional Lopi yarn in addition to other kinds. They have a great website at http://alafoss.is . The website is mostly in English so it's easy to navigate.We got a ride from the factory outlet store to the factory in the company vehicle pictured here. We started the tour where the yarn comes in. Bales and bales of yarn, both separated into white or other colors and natural mixes. I'll be posting more pictures on my flickr page, which I've also just started. From the bale room we saw where they ran in up a converyer that almost looked like putting it on a comb, but this conveyer just led it to a dryer where it was fluffed. Then it was put on a comb of the machine and as it ran through it looked like a very thin blanket. As it continued through the machine it started becoming threads.
We saw one woman with a very interesting job. She was running a machine that made skeins of yarn from cones, as the yarn from one cone got low, she'd use a little hand held knot tier to connect it to the next cone. YES, I saw the woman who puts knots in the yarn that you run into at the worst possible time!
We saw where they dye yarn. Some they dye before spinning, and some they dye after. It seemed like most was done before to give it a fairly constant color. The yarn dyed after spinning was being done in different shades of the same color. Not too much of that could be done in one batch, so I could see why it never seems like there's enough of a dye lot.
We saw they machine that makes pull skeins, then the skeins were sent down the line to be labeled and from there into bags holding about 12 skeins.
Of course there were racks and racks of a veritible rainbow of yarn. I was positively drooling.
