Taking my usual gift-crafting break until the new year! Wishing you and yours a great finish for 2023.
Our last stop on our amazing tour of Ireland was Killarney, which was also stunning. Beautiful mountains, our hotel (that Walt Disney stayed at!) was on a lake and had a bunch of lovely touristy activities to partake in.
The highlight of this visit was the Kerry Woollen Mills, which is the last of the three historic mills in Ireland. It’s quite a bit out of town on a river (that they no longer use for wool production, but needed it back in the day!) and has survived the centuries by adapting. Most of their production is dedicated to weaving finished goods now, but they still make yarn today!
The first step was pallets and pallets of high-grade sheep fleece. It got sucked via vacuum tube (super satisfying) into a giant picker machine.
Then it gets dyed and sorted by color. Kerry Woollen Mills is famous for their heathered, tweedy colors that get picked by their staff. Then those colors of wool gets blended and predrafted into another machine (that also has a vacuum that sucks up leftover fibers to return to the beginning of the predrafting machine. Nothing goes to waste!).
After predrafting, the singles get spun. This was the most wild step to me! This machine had spindles, almost exactly what I use to handspin my yarn. The difference is there were hundreds of them spinning at the same time!
The spindles then go across the way to another warehouse, where they are plied on yet another machine (that’s four total for these yarns). Then the yarn is ready for us hand-knitters or to be woven on their amazing looms! That was also really cool. If you blinked, you missed the shuttle.
We finished our adventure with a jaunt through their yarn shop! I picked up more classic Aran yarn in colors I couldn’t pass up and one merino, sock-weight yarn in “Celtic green.”
Visiting Ireland via this tour was truly an unforgettable, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity! I’m so grateful for everything I got to do and learn.
FahrOut Fiber Adventures 
What a great experience, Emma. The colors of the yarn in your photos are beautiful.
Many blessing to you in the holiday season!
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