Spring Break Road Trip 2006!
Okay for those of you who didn’t know where yesterday’s map had us heading, a few of us gals from our SnB group took a road trip to Brown Sheep in Nebraska. Above you can see some of the highlights (more here).
It was one of the best road trips I’ve had. Ashley had the foresight to choose only music with female vocals for the ride and we just bounced along the Interstates and Highways to the Scottsbluff area of Nebraska. It was a much easier and shorter drive than expected. Mapquest gave us an estimate of about 2.75 hours, but we’re prettty sure it is easily done within 2.5 hours with no dangers of a speeding ticket (if you don’t take a bathroom break). We ate at a great greasy spoon called (I’m not kidding here) The Whistle Stop Cafe. It was in an old train depot and they even had a caboose outside. The food was fantastic (in a fat-laden sort of way, you know, sinful)! The onion rings were even battered rather than breaded! Yum!
While I mention Mapquest, I should make a note that their directions are not correct. They forgot a turn and an additional leg in the directions. In order to stay on 92 you do take a left as the directions indicate, but when you get to a 4-way stop you need to take a right and continue what I think is ~2 miles (though keep in mind I wasn’t the one driving). There is a school on the right hand side and if you turn left you’ll see the Brown Sheep sign.
It was wonderful to tour the facilities. We even got to meet Harlan Brown the man who started it all when a packing plant near by shut down. Unfortunately, we were not allowed to take photos in the mill. I’m quite sad as there are hundreds of photos I took in my head of really great artsy yet industrial shots. If you have the chance to be in this area of the country I’d highly recommend taking that side trip. Though do call ahead as they don’t keep a regular schedule for tours.
Despite great temptation I managed to be good and stayed well within my budget I had set for myself. I even came away more or less with what I had planned on - lots of fiber, yarn for a Wobbly Circles tote from the current IK, some undyed yarn, and yarn for Mim’s Seraphim (though I misremembered the weight so I’ll have to rethink what I use that yarn for and choose some other yarn for her shawl). I came in well under $100 (my budget)! Ashely and MC did great too and did a lot of buying of yarn for gifts.
Two of the bags in the photo above are roving. They just take you into the mill and you can pull what you want out of huge boxes of mill ends of the roving and you pay by the pound. There was a box of natural roving (which I really should have gotten some of for playing with dyeing roving, but it isn’t that far of a drive so next time), a box of dyed regular roving (from the heathered yarns) and a box of dyed superwash roving (from the heathered superwash yarns). The two natural colors in the roving bags are regular roving and the bright colors are superwash. Notice that bright yellow? I wasn’t going to take any of that and then I thought about how next month’s Project Spectrum colors are yellow and orange so I put some in. I haven’t taken and weighed stuff yet so I don’t know how much of what I got, but I suspect the yellow will be enough for some fingerless gloves or something maybe. I think these are also from the new colors of yarns they will be releasing in June. We got to see those rovings go into the spinner and I think these are from those colors, just not blended as much yet.
The third bag has the yarns. I chose a lighter almost slate blue for the main body of the tote with accents of a warm and a cool pink, a medium lavender, and a deep plum. I suspect there will be a fair amount of each of those colors left over so I’ll probably make some charity colorwork hats with whatever remains.
I’ll have a bit more about the road trip next week.
