(upbeat music) - We are in the Nome Schoolhouse.

It is a renovated 37,000-square-foot maker's mecca in the great state of North Dakota, in the tiny little city of Nome, N-O-M-E.

My name is Christi Armbrust.

In 2018, I partnered with a good friend and we decided to renovate an old school house.

So we went school shopping and chose the Nome Schoolhouse.

It had good bones.

It was structurally sound, but it did need new electrical, new plumbing, new HVAC, you know, repairs of all sorts.

And we also added 17,000 square feet onto the schoolhouse as well.

And it took three years to do the renovations.

In July 1st of 2021, we had our grand opening and haven't looked back.

It's been just growing and growing.

The Gnome Schoolhouse is so, so much, and so much more.

We offer retreats, we offer weddings, we offer space just for folks to come out and book a room.

We have 11 beautifully appointed hotel rooms.

We don't have TVs in our rooms by design.

We want you to come here and just unplug.

We have a retail store.

We have classroom space.

We have an event center.

We have two bars.

We have a restaurant.

(upbeat music) Every month, I do a retreat.

It's a three-day retreat called the Barn to Yarn Experience.

On one piece of property, we actually have the fiber animals.

We actually have the full processing mill.

It's a very unique situation because usually when you go to a retreat, especially fiber arts retreat, you're missing one of those components.

But we have everything here on one piece of property.

So when you come here, it's all here at your fingertips and you can be immersed in the entire experience of Barn to Yarn.

When we start in the barn, of course, we have a growing herd of fiber animals.

So currently we have Walter.

He is our mini highland cow.

And we comb him and we use, his fiber is a little coarse, but we blend it with wool, and we have it crocheted into soap pockets that you can put a bar of soap in and it's like an exfoliating cloth right at your fingertips, which is kind of cool.

We have two Valais Blacknose sheep.

We have a Rambouillet sheep.

We have an Icelandic sheep.

We have two alpacas, and we have two Angora goats currently.

The process of getting Barn to Yarn first, of course, starts with your animal.

So you shear the sheep, and you rough skirt it.

So then that comes in down to the mill, and we do a further skirting process where we literally go through and we monkey-pick everything that we don't want in our yarns and rovings.

And then we wash the wool, we scour it, and then it starts the process.

This is our first step, and this is the picking stage.

So what this is doing is I'm sending in this obviously dyed fiber into the picker, and the picker, it has a drum with about three-inch-long teeth that spin around and open up the fiber, and spit it out, and then it's all ready for carding.

And what carding is, is it's aligning the fibers.

It's combing the fibers so that they're all going in the same direction.

And from there, we go to the drafter and what the drafter does is it takes those aligned fibers and drafts them thinner, pulls them thinner, and then we jump over to the spinner, it actually takes that roving and turns that into a single, and then we take those singles and we go to the plier, and the plier takes however plies we are making and plies them together, and puts it on a big bobbin.

And then we go to the Skeiner and the Skeiner scans it into a finished tank of yarn.

And that is what we sell.

Ta-da!

(upbeat music) It is such an honor to bring what we have in one piece of property here in North Dakota, because it doesn't exist anywhere in the world.

To see people create, and learn, and enjoy the space of the Nome Schoolhouse in all the different corners and areas that they can hang out in and learn, it (sighs), it just warms my heart because I know just walking in, it's just feeds creativity.

Whether you're a pastor trying to write sermons or you're a watercolorist and you want to sit out back and sketch Walter out, or a fiber artist, it just takes you back and just opens your mind and lets your creativity just flow.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] Funded by the members of Prairie Public.