Stitches East 2008: I picked up a skein of lace weight, looked closely at the twist, the weight, and the feel of it, and said to the dyer, The base is Jaggerspun Zephyr?

Stunned, she asked me, How did you know!

I knit a lot of lace….

And that is how I met Karida Collins of Neighborhood Fiber Co (currently on hiatus due to health.) Wonderful woman.

Jaggerspun, one of the last old American spinning mills, went out of business a few years ago. The building has been sold and rather than being torn down is going to be turned into new housing.

There’s a young couple who moved to a farm in Maine who had a dream of someday owning a mill–till they priced the possibilities. HAH! No way in the world.

Later, though, a sudden thought and the courage to ask a question…

The new owners not only thought it would be great to preserve the spinning equipment, they GAVE it to them when they could have scrapped the metal. All the couple had to do was take it apart and haul it away.

Can you just picture a determined guy with a screwdriver and 100 feet long of spinner and plyer machinery with his wife taking pictures so they can figure out how to put it back together again? Their barn wouldn’t do after all, so now they’re planning where a new building will need to go that would best serve their future business–when they can pull the funding together.

You look at their pictures (blog link. To see what it looked like before the dismantling, some Instagram photos here) at the size of all of that and, holy cannoli, wow. Yeah. No wonder it’s been taking awhile.

Their crowdfunding link is here but it seems to be down tonight.