The Independent Stitch

Knitting and mental (and physical) health

2010-03-17T03:53:24-06:00

Since I got back from my work time in the mountains, just over two weeks ago, I have been unable to settle on a knitting project. I haven't been able to put yarn and needles, idea or pattern, and sustaining interest together and keep them there. Normally I have a pair of simple socks going, and that's what I worked on during odd moments in the mountains. I've finished two pairs I haven't even worn yet.

During the push for the final deadlines on The Project (in its expanded form), I still need knitting. I actually went to a meeting last weekend without knitting. This is unheard of, and not conducive to my comfortably sitting still. Fortunately, I made it through the meeting—not an occasion where I could be working on The Project (except during breaks, when, yes, I did pull out my laptop and make some progress).

The problem of No Knitting has been getting worse, to the point where I was edgy all weekend. Yet I have, scattered around the house, a number of things that I've started and been unable to keep going on. Among other ideas, I've tried starting another pair of socks (or two), an Estonian-style scarf, a lace cowl (that actually got knitted, but wasn't interesting enough and didn't last long enough). I normally plan, swatch, and start much more than I finish, but in this case energy was leaking everywhere without getting me where I needed to go: to a calm space.

By Sunday it was clear that I'd better figure out a knitting project or my sanity and health were going to be at risk. It's not like I have much time to knit (since every time I sit down at home I'm working either on the laptop or at the spinning wheel). But I do still need the comforting, orderly progress of stitches while dealing with the unruly hugeness of The Project . . . which I've been doing amazingly well with so far, in part because of ongoing knitting.

What I need in this situation is something that will be challenging enough to hold my attention (the reason those simple socks won't work right now . . . they're like finger exercises) and yet undemanding enough that it won't add any stress . . . or require much brain power. My brain is completely focused on The Project. Which currently seems endless.

(The primary text was turned in on February 1, with one significant hole—that I just spent two days filling. The supplementary text was turned in on March 11, with three small gaps, one of which has been filled. I have not prepared all the samples for the supplementary material yet. Until I needed to fill the text gap, I was spinning all day every day, and I will return to that now that I have the gap filled.)

So I got another idea that I thought might work.

When I attended Cat Bordhi's Visionary Retreat in February, my roommate, a fine knitting designer, wore a garment she had knitted as a sample for another designer. It was Ysolda Teague's "Vivian" hooded cardigan. The sweater looked comfortable, stylish, and practical. I looked it up, and found it at Twist Collective. The photography for the pattern shows a more form-fitting version than my roommate had made and was wearing—and the extra ease she incorporated made it look like a comfortable sweater I'd be likely to actually wear.

I pondered yarns. Requirements: (1) enjoyable to work with = good quality, (2) free to cheap, and (3) works up at a gauge approximately equal to that of the pattern (willing to recalculate for minor gauge differences, but not to completely redraft the pattern . . . which I normally do, but Not Now).

I remembered a stash of handspun that would work for the sweater, and even located it. However, to get near the pattern's gauge, I'd need to uptwist the two-ply and then cable it: a good, appealing move, and one that could be accomplished relatively quickly, but every spinning-wheel minute needs to be devoted to The Project.

I didn't have enough of any other yarn that felt appropriate, but I did swatch some Brown Sheep Top of the Lamb, which looked promising. I needed yarn FAST: I needed to have some knitting in the works. All but one of the yarn shops within twenty minutes are closed on Sundays, and most are closed Mondays. But a new one . . . a new one I'd never been in . . . had Monday hours and its web site said it carried Brown Sheep. I also knew that it carries very nice specialty yarns, likely to be outside my nonexistent budget (my reason for not visiting the only other quick-access yarn shop that is open on Mondays; nearly everything they stock is, while lovely, pricey).

Mid-afternoon on Monday, I stole time I couldn't spare and drove down there. No Top of the Lamb. A small, well-selected stock . . . but only two yarns with (almost) enough skeins for the cardigan. One of which would have produced fantastic results, and would have aligned very neatly with the topic of The Project, but would have required me to recalculate the entire pattern, moving it from 4.25 stitches/inch to 5 stitches/inch: a job for another mental state, my more normal mental state. That would also have cost more than twice as much as I was ready to spend (although for what it was, the yarn was very reasonable).

What I ended up with is Brown Sheep's Lanaloft, which looks to me like Top of the Lamb without the mohair. I probably have enough: I bought all they had, which was one skein less than my "safety" amount.

On Monday evening at knitting group, I cast on for a sleeve (which I'm using as a swatch; this, too, is contrary to my normal, swatch-heavy practice, but I'd already swatched the Top of the Lamb, and have I mentioned I've been desperate?). Within inches, I knew I had the right combination of yarn, needles, and design to keep me anchored in some semblance of mental and physical health while completing The Project.

Whew.

Thanks to

my roommate at the Visionary Retreat (for planting the idea)
Ysolda Teague (for the pattern)
Brown Sheep (for reliable, reasonable yarns in good colors)
Your Daily Fiber (for being open on Mondays)

I may have been pulled back from the brink of both an ulcer (or other stress-related physical malady) and wigging out.

When within reach of the materials for working on The Project, that's still what I'm putting all my attention on. However, when I'm not within reach of those materials, or can't concentrate well enough due to life's other requirements, I can knit this satisfying yarn into these satisfying relationships. It's complex enough to be interesting, simple enough to be do-able with a frayed brain, and it's finite.

The "finite" part is what I'm not sure about on The Project . . . and why I especially need a bit of just-right knitting NOW.

Back down from the mountain

2010-03-08T08:39:13-07:00

Eight days ago, I came back down from the mountain, where I'd been hiding to work on the project. It was a great week. Reentry was bumpy, but I've got enough momentum to take a quick moment for a catch-up blog post.

I got lots done, although most of it was research and not spinning: both have to be completed, but I'm running hard and needing to short-circuit my usual, and ideal, process right now. I spun a little right before I left, just so I wouldn't have hauled all the equipment and fibers . . . as well as the books and magazine files . . . up the mountain for nothing.

Fortunately, by the end of my second week on the mountain my assistants had become much more proficient at their tasks, especially predrafting.

With the expanded scope of the project, I've felt a bit like this tree:

Scorched, but still growing vigorously toward the sky. I'm looking forward to feeling more like this:

Balanced, and with a variety of ideas in various stages of growth.

But the project is fascinating, and if it weren't hard it wouldn't be worth doing. I just hope I can do it well enough, given the time. I'll talk in a bit (after I've completed the current work) about exactly what it is. The current code name at home for this expanded portion is Voldemort. Its true name cannot be spoken until it's vanquished.

Back to the mountain, where it was time to pack the car. . . .

And say goodbye to a number of comforting sights. . . .

The gray sky and snowflakes encouraged efficient movement. The roads up there are challenging on a good day, and getting down ahead of any snow accumulation seemed like the best idea of the week.

Here's what the roads looked like, in the sun (not the day I left):

At the sides of the road are soft shoulders, quite happy to eat tires EVEN when they are not partially saturated with the "melt" part of spring's freeze/melt cycles, as they definitely were this week. This caused some adventure on the way back down.

The first step involved getting out of the driveway, which goes steeply from where you see the cabin on the left to where its end intersects this road, just at the right of the photo. There's a lip to pop up over at the top—you need to gun the car from the bottom and leap up onto the road with a burst of faith, because you can't see the road while you're doing that. You assess whether anybody's coming in another car before you take action (probably, but not certainly, the answer is "no"), and then you commit to the accelerator, hoping you make it past the ice sheet and don't slow down enough to slide back into the mud ruts where someone got stuck for more than an hour just a couple of days earlier.

At the top, I stopped for a moment and consciously thought, "One down. But you're not home until you're home." So true.

I'm an exceptionally careful driver, comfortable in the mountains, and within a half mile of that point I almost lost my car twice. In both cases, I would have come out okay, and in the first instance the car would have been fine (although I would have needed a tow truck) but in the second instance it probably would have been totaled; at the very least, the undercarriage would have been in really bad shape.

Look at that road photo again, and imagine that the dirt portion at the right side of it, where the tire tracks are, has been saturated with water and suddenly starts eating both tires on the passenger side of the car up to the axles. As the road sucked at the tires, I thought I was for sure going to need to walk somewhere and have someone call for a tow (yes, I have a cell, but the chances any cell will work in the mountains are slim to none). But I've only had to leave a car beside the road in winter and get home another way twice, and both of those times were in New England. My initial driving training also included excitement like 360-degree intentional skids. So I accelerated gently, steered firmly against that nasty quicksand feeling, and prayed.

And popped out of the mud! Only to discover I was catapulting toward a curve in the road, on ice, with a drop-off on the left hand side, which I was within inches of going over when I got the car straightened out without fishtailing and I was in what was (miraculously) an apparently solid middle of the road again, heading the direction I meant to be going, with traction on all four corners.

The drop-off was between six and eight feet down, along a gradual incline that would likely have kept the car from rolling, but I was really glad to find myself not there.

This was not a time to stop and celebrate, much less take a picture of my tracks (although that would have been interesting), so I kept up the yoga breathing I'd been doing and kept going, blessing my Subaru for being a fine, responsive, surefooted car. Not many cars (I've driven a lot of pickups) would have let me recover from those situations. The AWD and evenly placed weight on the wheels saved the day. I have always liked this car. At that moment, I realized that I really like this car. More than words can describe.

And here's what the trip down looked like, pretty much, although this was after I got onto the paved part of the road—there are mountains out there, they were just hidden:

Fortunately, you only need to be able to see the piece of road you're driving at the time.

I'm reminding myself of that as I work on this expanded project. And this morning, I need to focus just on the next bit.

But here are two visuals from late last week—I've finished this section:

Pretty fascinating. I have to keep remembering "one step at a time" and "KEEP MOVING!"

Where I've been working this week

2010-02-27T08:48:17-07:00

This is where I have the great good fortune of working this week:

This is the same cabin I was able to use for nearly a week in January. It's a number of miles from the nearest paved road. In the entire week, no car that has not been coming specifically here (another writer friend; the cabin owners' daughter, who has a weekend job up here; the guy who plowed after the snow) has come along the road.

The neighbors live a quiet, simple life:

(If any creatures live there, they have either four feet or wings. That cabin has no roof. The cabin I'm in does have one—it's a lovely, comfortable space with a lot of light.)

There are a lot of gorgeous things to see on afternoon walks, although I need to remember to walk more slowly than usual, because there's significantly less oxygen here than even at home—which is still pretty high altitude.

Some of the cabin's regular inhabitants are here, keeping me company and assisting with the research, writing, and spinning.

Sometimes they help quite a lot—like when I improvised a lazy kate for plying some fine singles . . .

And it turned out I'd really made an irresistible toy. . . .

Even though it's cold outside, it's warm in here . . .

sometimes, because of the terrific Vermont Castings stove and the basic solar gain of the cabin, it even gets too warm in the afternoons and I need to open the back door for a while, giving the cats their access to the outdoors, which they can only have on the deck because of the wildlife, including the coyotes and owls.

I feel blessed to have been given the use of this space for the current work, which otherwise would be a whole lot more difficult to accomplish. The cabin brings it from "completely impossible" to "insane, but maybe. . . .

I have one more day here, and I'm going to start making use of it. . . .

with help.

Moose

2010-02-25T10:23:17-07:00

It's been quiet around here for a reason. I've had my focus completely on The Project, which, as should be no great surprise, is a book. On fibers. My last post here was January 26, and on February 1 co-author Carol Ekarius and I turned in what we'd thought for quite a while was the whole book. However, a meeting (which I did not attend) held on January 11 changed the scope (adding 25% more material) and extended the deadline for creating the expanded portion until March 1. It has taken us two years to do the work we turned in on February 1.

Blog posts, sleep, and income-earning work all got shoved even farther aside than they had been (which was, basically, off the back of the desk already), along with everything but eating enough to keep up energy, short yoga sessions and walks with the dog so the body doesn't seize up and quit working, and . . . working. It's become clear that I won't make the March 1 deadline, but the text we sent on February 1 will keep the editorial folks busy enough that they are highly unlikely to care that we're a little late with the second batch.

The good news in all this is that the book is scheduled for release this fall.

Meanwhile.

This post will be short.

I have holed up in a cabin in the woods again so that I can get as much accomplished in a day as is humanly possible. Mostly there are many, many fewer distractions here (I have another short post on what it's like here; that will have to wait for another moment to get written—actually, I have several partly written posts in folders strewn around my hard drive). However, Wednesday there was a lot of distraction.

Looking out the window in front of the kitchen table at which I'm working, I saw these:

It's a mom and her near-grown calf. I got a number of pictures, because they hung out for a very long time in the morning. Mostly I just kept wandering over to the window to watch them.

Then, after more than an hour of slow, browsing movement heading north, something inspired them to dash off to the south:

But they returned again at the end of the afternoon—this is about 25 yards (23m) from me:

And decided to bed down for the evening. That's mom. The calf is in the woods to the right.

Here's a better photo by a writer friend, Judy Brenneman, who was here at the time working on a dramatic monologue (and being distracted by the moose). She has a better camera than I do. And invested a bit more patience in her shots. I kept grabbing quick photos and then thinking I should be working. . . . She actually went to a different window with a better viewing angle. You can see the "little" guy in the small trees on the right side of her photo.

That's about 50 yards (46m) from where I'm sitting right now.

Yet when I got up Thursday morning and looked out my bedroom window, I saw tracks and marks in the snow that hadn't been there the previous evening—and this is about 6 yards (5.5m) from the house:

I tweaked the photo, making it somewhat odd-looking, to emphasize the shadows and I put on Xs for the extent of an area that looked a whole lot like a moose resting place. I didn't see two tamped-down areas for the two animals, but I also didn't go look because I didn't want to add my boot-marks to the record . . . and there are two sets of moose-like tracks.

Now I really-o, truly-o need to get back to work. I am studying ungulates, but not this kind at this moment. . . .

Spinning Deborah Pulliam's wool

2010-01-26T21:43:58-07:00

On September 24, 2001, my friend Deborah Pulliam sent me a box of fibers.

Inside she tucked a note:

Deb's Down breed sample assortment
(sock wools to follow!)
Enjoy—

I opened, patted and admired, and set the box in a safe place to enjoy later, when I could truly appreciate the fibers.

Deb Pulliam and I shared a fondness for fleeces from the Down breeds of sheep, which are generally maligned as handspinning fibers. I'm not sure where her affinity for them began. I know it ran deep. In my case, when I started to spin in the 1970s wool in any spinnable form was as challenging to find as a spinning wheel (very), and what I could locate was, generally, grease Suffolk or Dorset from meat flocks or backyard sheep (in one case, the pets of children who were allergic to dogs and cats). So that's the kind of wool I initially learned to wash and then spin.

Years later, when Deb and I got to know each other because she was writing for Spin-Off and I was editing the magazine, I could never take Deb up on her open invitation to come visit her in Maine. I was a single mother in a precarious financial state; both time and money for travel were scarce. But we had hour-long-plus phone conversations, often on Saturday evenings, and we exchanged e-mails, and occasionally we met in person: at a SOAR in northern Vermont and at a Textile Society of America meeting in Northampton, Mass.

In 2007, when Deb was at the end of her fight with cancer, I finally flew to Maine to see the home whose restoration I'd heard about and of which I'd seen many photos. I went to help Deb be in her home, rather than the hospital, during her final weeks. At that point, it was not a time for much talk about about wools.

The project I'm working on now began its life in fall 2007, not quite six months after Deb departed from this plane of existence. Over more than two years, co-author Carol Ekarius and I have been gathering fibers for it. As we have gotten close to our deadline, there has been what I consider a serious gap in what we've been able to obtain: we have not been able to find representative samples of all six core Down breeds. We've located good Shropshire, Southdown, and Suffolk (what I've come to think of as "the S set"). We have been missing Dorset Down, Hampshire, and Oxford.

I remembered Deb's box and thought hard. These wools are special to me, and I wasn't sure I wanted to have them subsumed in the mass of fibers I'm processing. But I decided (no, I KNEW) that Deb would want the Down breeds well represented, and I pulled her box from its safe corner to see whether what she'd sent might match what we were missing.

She had tucked in Dorset, although what she sent is almost certainly (because of where it came from) wool grown by a poll Dorset (white-faced sheep), rather than by the Dorset Down (brown-faced sheep) that we need:

Dorset—from Cummington (?), Mass.
My favorite of this year's fleeces!
Combed w/ double pitch Viking combs

The "Cummington (?)" means Deb almost certainly acquired the wool at the Cummington Sheep and Woolcraft Fair, which she took great pleasure in attending. The wool itself may not have come from the town of Cummington, and she was diligent in her documentation.

Even though this wool wouldn't fill one of our gaps, I spun it. I spun it with more care than I've been able to apply to the other samples, which are being produced with unseemly speed. I may be willing to dedicate these wools to the project, but I am not willing to rush their spinning.

Then I turned to the next packet:

Ryeland from Lanark, Scotland
Combed w/ Louet mini combs
Because of being rolled & shipped, lock structure is messed up—probably should have just carded it all—
(but I love combing!)

Ryeland is Down-like but not from the same branch of the sheep family tree. We have two Ryeland samples. The black is lovely, and I've spun it, but the white was not a good representative of the breed so while I'd pulled sample locks I had not made a skein. So I turned to the wheel with Deb's sample. She had combed about half with her Louet mini-combs. After reserving sample locks, I combed the remainder on my Louet mini-combs and spun a skein that speaks effectively for Ryeland.

I love combing, too. My primary fiber-prep tools for this project are a pair of Louet mini-combs (mine are two-row) and a pair of double-pitch Viking combs.

Change to post: It's morning and the Ryeland's dry now, so I've taken its photo. I also put the Dorset skeinlets in the shot again, because their original photo was taken in my spinning area at night with woefully inadequate artificial light. I knew if I didn't get the post up when I had both the thought and a moment, it would never be written, so I took what I could get. . . . The extra fluffiness in the Ryeland is just part of what good Ryeland does, even when spun with predominantly worsted (unfluffy) techniques. The Dorset is also wonderful. I want to knit it and show what it can do. (Must Move On.)

Within the boxes of fibers we had acquired from other sources, I located a bag of Oxford that I had held off on processing—not one Deb had sent, but wool from a meat flock in the Great Plains. As soon as I had seen it initially, I knew that getting anything from it that would show the potential of Oxford would be a challenge. It was full of the sort of chaff that doesn't wash out and doesn't fall out during preparation and spinning (as a lot of vegetable matter does).

Realizing that this was as good as I was going to be able to get, I sorted through and found enough clean locks to spin a small skein (on the right). I also spun a skein to show the persistence of this particular type of chaff (on the left).

So we have Oxford now. Deb would be happy.

And Deb's taken care of Hampshire for us in glorious fashion, although I haven't spun these yet:

Natural black & white Hampshire from Stillwater, ME *
Carded @ Val Weiland's little mill [DR note: Wood-Stock Farm Carding Mill, Hampden, ME]
* Owners got rid of all Hamps because "We want to sell wool to handspinners" so they bought Romneys. Argh!

I'll also spin her Suffolk, even though I have already spun a very sweet Suffolk that we obtained (through some sort of miracle) on eBay. (Some of the best . . . and some of the worst . . . of our samples have come from eBay.)

Suffolk—backyard sheep in Brooklin, ME
A tad coarse (esp. compared w/ Dorset) but very serviceable
Some extra veg. & dirt but washes up nicely.
Nice counter to "Suffolk is crap/no good for spinning"
Prize comment from workshop participant: "Hey, you can make a nice soft yarn from coarse fleece!"
Combed w/ double pitch Viking combs

I still don't have a Dorset Down sample. I may need to proceed without it (along with a few other breeds, like the Arcotts and Romanov and all of the "hairy mutant Romneys"). We're not being allowed to take forever with this project, much as we'd like to. There's that deadline.

As I've been spinning Deb's wool, appreciating her help despite the fact that she's gone, I've come to realize that I've been a custodian for these fibers. The reason I haven't already spun them is that Deb needs to be part of this project. Her Down breed sample packet was meant not just for me, but for all fiber folk. So now that's the job it's doing.

And I'm going to make one more try at getting some Dorset Down. . . . For Deb's sake. . . .

Trading up for Ireland: a bunch of handspun yarn

2010-01-15T04:56:50-07:00

Writer Rosemarie Colombraro lives in Vermont and wrote a recent post about how much she wants to go to Ireland and how that's not a practical thing for her to have in mind. She especially wants to go to the Galway region (I was spinning Galway wool for The Project just yesterday).

She heard about an event there and it got her thinking. She said:

This area of Ireland had called to me for the better part of my 50 years on this earth. It was on my "Boxcar List." That’s like a bucket list, but much bigger and harder to ignore. I had written about the female pirate queen, Grainne O’Malley, and recognized her castle immediately among the pictures on the workshops web site. There was a strange need to visit, to walk the countryside and find spiritual sites I knew but could not describe, to breathe the air of a country that I recognized only through genetic memory, through the drops of blood that came from my Irish ancestors.

She decided to see what she might have around that she could "trade up" into a trip to Ireland, like the guy who traded a red paperclip up until he owned a house. She made a list of several items she could easily spare:

1. 6 AAA batteries. Not new, but a few of them might have a little bunny left in them.
2. A wire hanger, used.
3. My wig, used this summer during my bald period.
4. The hair of a dog. Really. The hair of a dog.
5. A Virgin Mobile Kyocera phone , with chew marks and a battery that is still fairly good.
6. And, if I find it, I will offer a four-leaf clover, found by me. This is surely worth an entire trip, flight and all! Let me know if anyone is interested in this one and I will look harder.

Here’s more:
JUST ADDED: My high school class ring, circa 1975.
My voice: Got an advertising project that needs a female voice?
My skill: Blog content? A story…on Ireland? Want me to tweet about your Irish wolfhound?

Grainne O'Malley, about whom Rosie had written, is the subject of Molly Lyons' exquisite one-person play, A Most Notorious Woman (with fine original music by Martin Stillion). I thought that if Rosie did not know about the play, she certainly needed to. I dropped a comment on her blog:

Okay, no trade from me yet (though I may think of one), but a question: have you seen . . . A Most Notorious Woman? It’s about Granuaile (Grace O’Malley, pick your name: the pirate queen). It is EXTRAORDINARY. I saw its world premiere—and have seen it three more times, and will see it again when I have another chance (and I don’t tend to do things I’ve done before).

Rosie responded:

Thanks for the info on the Grainne play, Deborah! And…um…this hair of the dog…beautiful spinnable Belgian Tervuren hair. A manilla envelope stuffed full. Want to trade for a sample of your yarn, to be put up for further barter?

Okay, THAT's interesting. Spinnable fiber. She's got my number. I figured I could find a sample of surplus handspun, probably even a whole skein, to trade for it.

Then I got to pondering. To make a long story slightly shorter, here's my trade for the dog hair (I like Belgian Tervurens, and I would love to hear that Rosie, whom I have never met, gets to go to Ireland):

Here's what I wrote about my trade:

Handspun yarn, I’d call it “rose gray,” a medium gray with a warm cast to it, plus a knitted swatch and a small piece of the original fiber: 2 pounds 4 ounces (1 kg, not a typo) of two-ply, light sportweight, moderately thick-and-thin, 14 wraps per inch, suitable for knitting or crochet, and strong enough to be woven (warp and/or weft).

This is a former UFO (unfinished object), about two-thirds of a sweater that I have disassembled and turned back into skeins of various sizes: most are good-sized, a handful are quite small. I’ve just washed the skeins [note: retrieved from semi-sweaterdom, skeined, and bathed in a hurry, as I was packing to head for the cabin], but they still have a bit of crinkle from their previous adventures, which were nearly successful. The skeins got slightly disoriented while I was spinning out the water in the washing machine (despite three skein ties each), but will be easy to ball.

I think the fiber was an Ashland Bay multicolored Merino top . . . that’s what it looks and feels like. Spinning quality: this was some of my intermediate yarn, the sort that a beginner aspires to and that gives a spinner with much experience an opportunity to feel good about her or his own yarn. It knits or weaves up to a nice, supple, lightweight fabric, or it can be worked double for more body (and quicker working).

A spinner could also uptwist the two-ply and turn it into a cable.

I actually like this yarn a whole lot. It's got great karma. It's sort of tweedy, like Ireland, and sort of rosie, like Rosie. I have no idea why it has not wanted to become something for me, other than yarn. I'd love to know what it becomes for someone else! (Whenever.)

Here's what I'm getting in return:

Traded to Deb: hair of the dog
This is a manilla envelope full of clean soft Belgian Tervuren hair from the coat of Richelieu’s Faelhan of the Land, the only surviving puppy of the last litter of American and Canadian CH Richelieu’s Exeter D’Allante, CDX, PT. This hair will spin into either a soft brown or gray yarn. “Fae” is my best buddy!

I'm thrilled. Fae's hair might make a special appearance in The Project, too. We'll see.

If you want to know more about this trading-up sequence, just started, there's a special page for it now.

Anybody else want to play?

Yes, all of it.

A snow story--but what is it?

2010-01-14T14:54:17-07:00

Taking a quick break from The Project, I walked up the mountain a little way. As I was returning, I noticed these converging (or diverging) tracks on the other side of a little valley:

The set on the right consists of a series of lined-up holes. They made me think of hand- and toeholds cut in a rock canyon wall. The set on the left is continuous. The trails join just below a rock (I didn't climb down to take a closer look, for many reasons, including disturbing the snow—the slope was steep, so disturbance would have been major). The lined-up holes start at the dirt road above the rock.

I did walk around the switchback road and look from the other side. This is all about 50 yards (45m) from the cabin where I'm staying to work.

Seen from the other side, the discontinuous trail is on the left and the smooth, continuous one is on the right.

I leaned over to get a photo of some of the tracks just below the road. They were deep enough that I couldn't tell what sort of pawprint might be at the bottom.

Back to the wool.

South Wales Mountain wool (and kemp)

2010-01-12T09:37:12-07:00

Most of the time fiber folk look for and exclaim over fine, soft wools, with good reason. They're lovely to work with and they feel really good in our hands and when we wear clothing made from them. Merino is by far the most famous of these wools.

What I have been playing with recently are some wools that are the antithesis of Merino. They mix, in varying proportions, the three types of fiber that can be found in a sheep's fleece:

wool, that familiar stuff (which comes in an array of textures all on its own)
hair, which is stiff and smooth (think horsehair, or a dog's outer coat)
kemp, which is bristly and coarse (pig bristles??? only more irregular? like itty bitty white twigs?)

Merinos, and many other highly developed breeds, have only wool in their fleeces.

Hair and kemp show up in the fleeces of sheep that can handle rough weather: storms, cold, damp. (Hair is also predominant in the body coverings of sheep breeds that can tolerate extremes of heat. Those sheep look a lot like goats.)

One of the breeds I've been spinning is South Wales Mountain. It's a big sheep, with a tough, weather-resistant coat.

Another spinner recently asked me whether this breed's wool is medium or long, and I had to answer that it wasn't really either, in the way we normally think about medium or long wools. The word medium could be applied to breeds like Corriedale and Suffolk and many, many others. Medium is a huge category. When we say longwool we tend to mean the English luster (shiny) longwool breeds, like Cotswold, Lincoln, and Leicester Longwool, as well as the more familiar Romney and the relatively unfamiliar Devon & Cornwall Longwool. In all of these cases—both medium and longwools—the fleece consists of wool, with little or no hair or kemp present.

South Wales Mountain is, then, neither medium nor long as those terms are normally understood. It's one of the mountain breeds, which tells us a bit more about it, but still not enough because there's a good deal of variety in that category as well.

South Wales Mountain fleeces are full of kemp. SERIOUSLY full of kemp. In addition, while most kemp is white (and all kemp resists being dyed), South Wales Mountain can have smatterings of red kemp as well.

Here's some of the South Wales Mountain that I've been spinning:

At the bases of the locks, there's a bit of dry scurf or clumping; you can see that in the lock on the left. The easiest way to deal with this is to trim it off, as I've done to the lock on the right.

It's a little hard to see, but the lock is about 50/50 kemp and wool, and the parts are about the same length. I could probably comb the locks and remove the kemp reasonably well, although not perfectly. The process would be tedious and the results questionable. If I tried to card this fiber, I'd end up with an exercise in frustration, with kemp flying all over the place (which it will kind of do no matter what, but this would make it far, far worse) and rolags that would be hard to roll and wouldn't hold their shape and would be misery to draft. Someone else might want to prep these fibers in those ways, and might succeed beautifully at it, but I go both for the path of least resistance and the path that, for me, preserves and ideally highlights the unique character of the breed's fleece.

What I've done isn't something I've seen or learned elsewhere, although I doubt that it's anything new. During spinning, the kemp and wool will tend to draft out at different rates, and my goal is to get them to feed into the twist together, as they are in the lock. So I open out each lock into a kind of rhomboid shape, with a leading edge from which I begin to spin, working my way down the lock and catching a series of tips in progression. As I reach the end of one lock, I add another, similarly prepared.

Kemp resists not only dyeing but twist. The two primary concentration points in spinning this type of fleece are even feeding of the fiber and corralling of the kemp. Some kemp escapes no matter what.

So what's the yarn like?

It's a natural-born novelty yarn, with texture galore. If I dyed this yarn, the kemps would stay whatever color they are (mostly, but not all, white) and the wool context would take the dye's color, increasing the contrast between the types of fiber.

Most South Wales Mountain fleeces become carpet (for us, "rug") yarn. Some can be used in clothing, but not for next-to-the-skin wear! I can easily see a yarn like this used as an accent in a garment, though, used in small amounts at places that won't come in contact with a body. And it could inspire many types of basketry, sculpture, or tapestry constructions . . . all situations that Merino doesn't have the commanding presence to handle.

The wools and I hit the road again

2010-01-11T09:40:11-07:00

I've gotten very good at packing the car with all the materials, tools, and supplies for the wool project. I can fit in twelve (12) of the file boxes, plus wheel, prep tools, food, and suitcase. For the current trip, which involves a final push to the deadline, I've had to resort to storing the wool packages themselves in large bags that will squish in around the other items.

This is my third trip away from home to work on The Project. I know exactly how things fit, and anyone who's read about the previous trips will recognize the basic Tetris-like results.

Passenger-side front:

Passenger-side rear:

Back:

Driver-side rear:

And I do leave the driver's seat available for me.

Each trip, I've gone to a different location, new to me. Twice (including this time) I have shared the space and rental costs with two other writers. This time, I went up a day early for several reasons. The plan was to call the cabin's caretaker from the road so she could meet me with the key and give me the overview of well and stove operations.

Here's the road to where I am this week (through the windshield):

I called from about here, because cell service tends to be patchy (at best) in the mountains. I was still about 45 minutes away.

Here's the cabin, which is about 4 miles (6.5 km) past where the county-road pavement ends:

Here's the driveway to the cabin:

The caretaker hadn't arrived by the time I got there, so I walked around a little bit . . . and realized I was being greeted (or warned off) from inside:

In order not to further alarm the dog, I continued my explorations away from the house, which seems to be located in a high-traffic area.

This looked familiar and comforting:

Softwood, but that's what we can get around here. Slab wood, which is economical. Well chopped, which is handy.

I won't have much time this week for admiring my surroundings, so I caught this photo:

And this one:

I'd love to come back some time when I don't have work due on a deadline. I did bring snowshoes, in case one of us needs to get out and there's no other way, and the caretaker showed me not only the ins-and-outs of the cabin (and introduced me to its guardian) but told me about great cross-country, snowshoe, and hiking trails. However, I'm inside this week, except for the occasional walk to clear my brain (and regular trips to the woodpile; softwood burns fast, even in a good Vermont Castings stove, a smaller model of the stove we used to heat one of the Massachusetts houses we lived in).

And now I'd better get to work.

Special thanks to all the members of my family and to the fellow writers who are sharing the space who have made it possible for me to be here this week, and to Carrie and her folks, who are letting us make ourselves at home here.

Me on the radio--"This I Believe," about spinning

2010-01-07T08:21:45-07:00

I look forward to writing more regular posts; I've got thoughts and topics lined up that just aren't getting here because I'm working toward The Project's deadline, which is February 1 (in its current, and likely final, definition).

But I need to add this quick note.

On Tuesday, I drove to Greeley, Colorado, to record for broadcast a short (500-word) essay that I wrote for NPR's "This I Believe" project, which has since evolved into its own separate effort, still closely linked to NPR. The topic is spinning, and more.

I recorded it for our regional NPR affiliate, well-established and respected community radio station KUNC.

I'm told the piece will be broadcast today at 3:44 pm Mountain time, and repeated on Sunday, 1/10/2010, at 7:34 and 9:34 am (still Mountain time).

Within its broadcast area, KUNC can be heard via radio. Outside that area, people can listen by going to the station's website and clicking on the blue rectangular button in the upper left corner, above the station's logo, that says "Listen live." I'm told that the piece will also be archived, and that I'll be sent the link when it's available.

Recording was fun. I've had a cold, but figured I would be okay to do the job although I might sound a little huskier than usual. I fixed myself a big mug of Gypsy Cold Care tea, liberally dosed it with honey and lemon, and sipped it as I made the 45-minute drive to the station.

When I arrived at the station's offices, which are on the fifth floor of a modern office building, Brian Larson took me into the studio for the reading-and-recording.

The last time I was on radio was about thirty years ago (before my daughter was born), and that was a 20- or 30-minute interview. It was all live. I've also done a lot of public readings of my work . . . again, always live. If you flub, you keep going. By comparison, this was easy: digital recording, with the option of punching in a re-take for any sentence that didn't work just right.

Microphones have come a long way in the past thirty years. Yet the biggest trick to the process was the size of the mic and its screening, which made it hard for me to see the pages I was reading from. Fortunately, I had printed a special copy for the occasion, with large type and generous line-spacing.

Brian told me that if I didn't like the way I said something, I should just start that sentence over again immediately and he'd cut out the problem spot and end up with a clean recording. After the first time, I got the trick—mostly, that involved getting used to the fact that I could re-speak a line I wanted to improve. I took advantage of it a few times. My re-takes involved spots where I couldn't adjust the sheets of paper around the mic fast enough to keep them in my view, and one place where I got off the rhythm of a sentence.

When we were done, Brian asked me if I wanted to listen to the rough version. I said, "Sure!" Although my voice usually sounds strange to me when it's recorded, it sounded a little less strange than usual, even with a bit of a cold. When it was done, I said, "I can live with that—both the text and the recording."

Brian then delivered me to Kirk Mowers, who will do the intro for the piece. He interviewed me casually, making some notes on his computer. I'll be interested in what he says. I'm not sure the answers I gave him were especially interesting or coherent. We did get to talking about wool, and he mentioned that he can't wear it because it itches, so he got the quick overview of how many types of wool there are and the idea that there might be some that he could wear just fine. It's a little dangerous to talk with me about wool.

The whole process was comfortable and enjoyable. Lots easier than writing the essay!

I wrote the piece over an intense three weeks in the summer of 2005. Because of the length, and because you have to choose ONE overriding topic, this was one of the most challenging pieces I've ever written. The project's guidelines offered helpful tips for hitting the mark for the specific task and format.

I knew relatively quickly what I wanted to write about, but the essay went through five significantly different drafts ("trash and start over") before it was completed. The first draft of the core essay is radically different from the final one—and that first draft is more like my "normal" essay style than the finished piece is. To meet the goals of the "This I Believe" project, I needed to become more direct in presenting my thoughts than usual (I often leave the reader to draw conclusions and connections) and to cut out a number of narrative elements. What I believe did not change from first to final. Through the revisions, the way I expressed that belief gained a great deal of clarity, while I also think it lost some nuances. (I like both versions.)

I am still completely comfortable with this essay. I could, of course, write a whole series of essays on many things that I believe in—and that series would begin with this one.

Here's the link to my original essay. Before the recording, I modified it slightly (at stoplights on the drive over) to adjust for the passage of time. I learned to spin longer ago than the original reflects. I tweaked a few sentences; I'm a perpetual reviser. Although those who read my posts know that our Border collie died just before Thanksgiving, I left her in the essay, both as a memorial and because her fur is still being spun into my yarns. (I managed to read that passage without a do-over, although I was worried about it and it was kind of like walking a fence: tears? no tears. Whew.) And I left the reference to spinning with friends in the afternoon, because that was true in reality at the moment I wrote the final, original draft and was still true on the day of the reading, although in a less literal sense. Changing that would also have required me to rewrite the whole ending of the essay.

KUNC's site will also host a copy of the slightly revised piece, as I recorded it: Brian was following along on a printout of the original as I read, and asked me to send them an updated file to go with the completed segment. I'll add links when I have them.