The small sign, Pict Wool, and the No. 5 on a door in the long brick building behind the old train station in Wilton were the only indications that I had arrived at the right place for my appointment with Bel Vassar.

Dagny, the resident four-legged greeter, woofed “hello” as I stepped over the threshold. I was following up on suggestions from several people that this should be one of my next stops for my column. It didn’t take long to learn that Bel and Paul Vassar had found the perfect place to birth and grow their business, Pict Wool, and that there definitely was a story that should be told.

It begins with Bel and Paul’s dream of working together. Yet there was a huge step between realizing their dream of forming a business together and the reality of Bel working as an artist creating finishes for aging plaster on museum reproductions and Paul working as a machine and motor-control specialist.

That step was shortened in an unlikely manner when Bel took up knitting a decade ago. Knitting meant that she put down her paint brushes and learned the art of using needles to create works in wool. This eventually lead to sorting, washing, picking, and carding fleece and hand-spinning her own yarn. As Bel said, “Spinning was the real beginning of the rabbit hole I began following.”

A trip to the Harrisville mills was the next step, or better, next leap, in this story. Bel returned home with a plan – a wool-processing business for local sheep farmers. She suggested to Paul that art and machine mechanics would make sense working together in this way. He had always supported her creative work and now there was a way to combine her talents with his.

Paul’s background in machinery, motor controllers, repair and retrofitting old equipment for companies gave him the perfect background to research the type of equipment they would need to set up a two-person wool processing mill. What sold them on the idea was learning that companies processing wool have a long line of customers.

After two years researching mini-mills and wool processing machinery, they found 85-year-old machinery in perfect condition that was ideal for processing wool for local sheep farmers. It just needed transportation from a Virginia farm to New Hampshire and Paul’s skill to get it set up and running after many, mostly idle, years.

The story continues when they found the “perfect place” to house their business, a former Abbot-owned mill building. What place could be more perfectly suited to this new business than a space where craftsmen built parts for the looms used for the weaving done in the former Abbot Woolen Mill, across the river a century or more ago? History was on their side.

The machinery was moved to the mill in May of 2021 and they opened for business in September that year. Clients initially found them by word of mouth. Participating in two annual festivals, the Wool Arts Tour held at five different Monadnock area farms in October and the New Hampshire Sheep and Wool Festival in Deering on Mother’s Day weekends helped grow their business - one dedicated to specializing in making wool yarn to a customer’s exact specifications.

As Bel and I were talking, a fiber artists loaded with a large bag of dyed fleece, Susan Weaver from Nelson brought her product in to be weighed and processed. When we entered the large room where the wool was weighed, this was the first time I saw the machines that do the work. I felt I was in a working museum. I’d heard about the machinery, but when Paul turned them on and seeing them working, that was awe-inspiring.

Anyone loving finely crafted machines could spend hours here admiring Paul’s perfect restorations and the elegance and simplicity they exhibit while working. What I found most amazing is that each machine is an elegant mechanical spin-off of the original hand tools used in the different wool processing steps, down to the nails used in carding the wool to the 16-spindle machine used to spin and twist the strands into yarn.

Paul and Bel explained there were many steps in between the weighing and carding and final drying of the yarn, some repeated at least four times to get a clean, straight and even strand of fiber.

On my way back to the shop area, I noticed the spinning wheel mounted on a top shelf. This turned out to be another tie to both recent and more distant Wilton history. It came from Dick Putnam, longtime and recently retired Main Street merchant whose shop was always the place to go to find out what was happening in town.

His great aunt Lydia Putnam Walker (1873-1956), owned and used that spinning wheel. Dick’s only demand when releasing it to Bel was that it “had to stay in Wilton,” where it will remain with a photo of Lydia standing beside the wheel. It’s mounted on the wall facing you as you enter the shop.

When I look at that photo I see an artist and her machine, only on a smaller scale than the artistry created by the machines at Pict Wool.