The mill sits on a bend of the Lamoille River where the drop is just steep enough to turn a wheel. In 1871 a carder named Elias Wrenn bought the water rights, put up a three-storey brick shed, and started taking fleece from farms within a day's cart ride. The wheel is gone. The building, the race and most of the floor plan are not.
Fleece arrives in bales from growers in Vermont, Wyoming and Montana. It is skirted by hand on slatted tables so the coarse britch wool and anything full of vegetable matter comes out before it reaches the scour. What is left is washed in four bowls of progressively cleaner water and dried on a conveyor at low heat, because heat is what makes wool go harsh.
We dye in the stock, not in the piece. Loose fibre goes into the kettle, which means the colour sits all the way through the yarn and heathers can be blended at the card rather than faked at the loom. Our greys are three greys. Our navy has a little black and a little madder in it, which is why it does not read purple under lamplight.
Three card sets, the oldest installed in 1948, comb the fibres roughly parallel and split the web into a rope. The spinning frames put in as little twist as will hold, because a softly spun yarn traps more air, and a blanket is only as warm as the air it holds.
Dobby looms, run slow. A faster loom makes more cloth and more broken ends. Ours throw about 180 picks a minute and a weaver walks four of them. Selvedges are checked every few yards against a pin gauge.
This is the step that makes a blanket a blanket. Woven cloth goes into hot water with soap and is agitated until the scales on each fibre lock together and the cloth shrinks, thickens and closes up. Judgement is everything: too long and it goes to board, too short and it pills for years. Three people on the floor are allowed to call it done.
The teasel gig raises a fine fuzz on the face of the cloth, which is what gives a good blanket its hand. A rotary shear then levels it to a consistent height. Both machines are a century old in design and neither has been improved on.
Upstairs, the sewing floor binds every edge — satin, whipstitch or a folded self-binding depending on the line. Each piece is then laid on a lit table and read by eye. Anything with a slub, a mis-pick or a colour drift becomes a Mill Second and is sold at a discount with the flaw described.