I had intended to post after each stop, sort of live-streaming our trip, but that didn't work out for timing or bandwidth reasons. So I'll just recap it here.
Our first stop was _Kunert Kreations_, where we bought a couple skeins of yard and some merino roving. There were more animal pelts than I've ever seen in one place because the woman who runs the place sews hats, doodads, and teddy bears out of the skin. This place had a strong air-freshener odor. <gag>
The gap between stops 1 and 2 was just over 2.5 hours, so we lunched on seed bread and cheddar cheese that we brought along to save time searching for food options. :-)
Stop 2 was _My Yarn Shop_ -- in a large shed off the driveway of their lake-house (which seems like a pretty affordable way to open a store). They also sold eggs and a bunch of Amish foodstuffs. We bought some artsy roving and a skein of yarn.
The third stop was _Just Yarnin'_ -- kind of a cute place. Cathy picked out this locally made orange and partially black stranded skein. I was mostly looking to reward stores for carrying spinning supplies and material.
Fourth stop was _Sutter's Gold 'n' Fleece_. We really wanted to buy something from each place we visited. And these rural yarn shops are pretty small, but usually there's something worth having. There wasn't much to desire here and we didn't really know what to do. They had some local handspun, but I can do better. And everything was in sealed plastic bags, which is pretty weird. As we were growing resigned, the proprietor pointed out this rack up at the ceiling at the back of the shop full of fiber in various states of unprocessing -- fleece to roving. They head down to the big Wisconsin fiber festival each September and bring stuff back. So I happily left with a back of yack down to play with!
_Venerabilia_, our fifth stop, was interesting. It's fabric and yarn, and the first thing I noticed was that it smelled terrible (in an unidentified way). A serious chunk of their business comes from buying the stashes when someone into fiber dies, and then selling it at a steep discount. ($30 skeins for $10, $15 skeins for $1, etc.) The stuff they carry new from the distributor was all of no interest -- cheap, scratchy wool and acrylic, that you would find at a craft shop rather than a yarn specialty store, but their second-hand stuff more than made up for that lack. We walked out with a whole bag of stuff for $40!
These last four stores were all within about 30 miles of each other but we now had another two hour gap before getting to stop 6 -- _The Craft Connection_ in Ashland. They had yarn, but it was a very uninspiring collection and we didn't want any. It was a general art and craft supply place and more than half of it was dedicated to fibercrafts, but it was just really ho-hum. They did have an impressive bead collection and Cathy found some stuff to covet on that wall. :)
Our seventh stop was an Alpaca farm with a self-serve store though the owner of the place stopped and chatted with us about her animals and shop for half an hour. She had fiber in the cloud but it was apparently going to be a bunch of work to go get it, so we just bought a skein of yarn. Most of what she sold was from a fiber-mill where the fleece from a whole bunch of alpaca farms is aggregated, but she also had a few undyed skeins that were purely from her animals, which seemed like a better souvenir.
We had another stop planned, but it was impossible to get there before they closed.
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