We had a bright and early start to the day today. We got up at 4:30 and got ready and took the Britrail out to Kidderminster, where the Brinton Carpet’s birthplace, headquarters, and one of their warehouses is located. It was awesome! They first told us a little bit about their company. It was started in 1783! Isn’t that crazy? I can’t believe how old it is. They split us into four groups and took us on different tours. So we started out with a tour of their warehouse where they make the carpet. Wow that was so awesome! We saw all the huge spools of yarn and how they put it all together to weave the carpets. There are two different styles of carpet, axminster and wilton. We got to see both ways of how they put it together! It really was so cool! So the way they make carpet it to take the huge spools of yarn and they have a machine that cuts the right amount of each color that they need to make the carpet. Then that yarn is hooked up to a thing that sucks it up and, depending on which carpet it is, it gets weaved together to the backing. After it’s all put together they check it for any mistakes and if there are any they will hand sew it to correct it! Crazy! And since the hard backing isn’t on yet it doesn’t show that they do that. After they do that it is run through a machine that shaves it down and makes it all one even length. Then they cut the extra sides off and run it through the backing machine. So it just runs over the gooey backing stuff and gets flashed dried. After that it is final inspected and then rolled up and shipped off. It’s quite the process. But it was cool to see all that. After that tour we went in and another guy told us about all their different patterns and designs and about some projects they have done. They can pretty much make anything you want. You can customize it in pretty much any way you want. It’s cool! After that they gave us lunch, which was interesting. I had a thing that tasted kind of like a cake doughnut on the outside but it had some sort of sausage thing in the middle… yeah it wasn’t very good. Anyways, so after lunch we got a tour of their archive. They have kept all of their designs from forever ago and they have also collected others that date back to the 1800’s! They were amazing! It has been a great resource not only to them but to others. When there is a renovation project that needs to be done, people will turn to them for help in knowing what the carpets should look like for that time period and also for color schemes and such. It really was so cool to see all those. They also had a book that had a bunch of swatches of fabrics that also date back a while. Man that was so fun to look through those! It’s crazy to see how modern some of those patterns are even though they are very old. After that tour we talked to some of the designers about some of the things they do. They will often times be sent samples of existing carpets and will need to match the colors and patterns into new ones. They also showed us some of the carpets that they have designed in the computer. One of them was over 200 feet wide! It was huge! They said it took them a couple years to come up with that whole pattern! So after that tour was the end of our little adventure for the day. It was a cool experience! They wouldn’t let us take pictures though so I don’t have any to share. But man it was cool! So Brinton’s picked us up at the train station so they took us back there. And the ride back was so funny! We were all dead tired from our constant busy schedules and from waking up so stinking early so it made for one entertaining ride! Ha ha! So we were all falling asleep in our seats, including me. I was sitting and bobbing next to Erica and all the sudden she started laughing and turns to me and says, “I just hit my head on the window!” She bobbed right into it! Ha ha! And from then on we couldn’t contain our laughter! Since we couldn’t take pictures earlier we decided we needed to take some so we tried to take some of us “sleeping” and we still could not stop laughing! Then we looked around our van of people and saw some more heads bobbing and necks suffering from whiplash! Ha ha it was the funniest thing! All that laughing and the lack of sleep on our parts just got us going for a long time! And we’ve been trying to pick up the British accent while we’ve been here so we practiced it a bit on the drive too. I have a lot of work to do! Ha ha! That was so fun! Erica and I are having way too much fun together! After we got home from the Brinton Carpet day (around 7:15!) we made spaghetti for dinner! It was so tasty! It was nice to be able to make something for ourselves and have it taste good! It wasn’t gourmet by any means but it was just what we needed! And thus ends another fun day full of excitement, fun, and adventure. And a lot of laughs!
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