MacAusland's Woollen Mills

MacAusland's Woollen Mills weaves wool blankets in Bloomfield, Prince Edward Island. A mill has stood on the Highway 2 site since 1870, first as a sawmill and a rollmill, and it started spinning yarn in 1902. Blankets came in 1932 and have not stopped since.

Archibald MacAusland started the mill, and his family has held it the whole way through, now into the fifth and sixth generations.

The mill buys its wool in the Atlantic provinces, and everything after that happens inside one building: washing, drying, carding, spinning, warping, weaving, fulling, dyeing, napping. Fulling shrinks and thickens the cloth, and napping raises the soft surface you feel on a finished blanket. The blankets are made in Canada, wool included.

The wool washing machine dates to 1949 and still runs, and most of the other equipment in the building is older than the people who run it. The mill replaces little of it.

MacAusland's says it is the only mill in Atlantic Canada still weaving traditional blankets from 100 percent virgin wool, and one of very few in North America working in nothing else. The mill weaves the blankets in checkerboard and in stripe, and it offers a range of weights. It also sells yarn, spun from one to five ply.