three bags full: learning to spin, on a budget

When I was a little girl, I used to save the silks when we'd peel corn-on-the-cob. I'd turn my bicycle upside down, and turn the pedal to get the back tire spinning, then I'd feed the silks into the spokes. I was spinning straw into gold, or wool into yarn. I was fascinated by the process and remember wondering how the expert spinners I'd see at country fairs and local pioneer museums made it look so effortless. 

Although it was a lifelong dream, the cost of learning seemed like a tremendous obstacle to me: hand carders are costly, not to mention the cost of a spinning wheel! Courses that teach spinning seemed pointless if I didn't have my own wheel on which to practice. Over the years, I've housed other people's wheels, but these seem as quirky and unique as their owners and I just didn't have enough basic know-how to produce anything.

So, I took my hand-made drop spindle, a gift from a friend, into my hands last month. I delved into a bag of roving I'd accumulated during my needle-felting phase, and got to work spinning funny little balls of colourful thick-and-thin yarn. I was hooked.

Once I got through the roving I had, I was hungry for more. Coincidentally, my husband has been at work learning about wool with his Kindergarten class, and had arranged to visit a farm where they'd be shearing sheep. He came home with a big, smelly, filthy fleece, and I dove right in, so to speak.

The first ball of uncombed, unprocessed yarn was brownish, pungent, and greasy with lanolin. I washed a small bit of fleece in a bowl of water, and the next ball came out whiter and softer.

I'd read about washing larger amounts of fleece in the washing machine. As I had no lingerie bags (alas, having no lingerie), I improvised, stuffing two net onion bags with filthy fleece and putting them to soak in a washer-full of hot water. I added less than a 1/4 cup of dish soap, and checked back now and then. When the water was really gross, I carried the bags up to the kitchen sink and let them soak in a rinse bath.

They still didn't seem as clean as I'd like, so I opened the bags up and let the fleece free. I continued adding a bit of dish soap, rinsing, and very gently swishing. I know that heat and agitation signal death to wool (unless you're intentionally felting); I was experimenting here!

I stuffed the fleece back into the onion bags and ran them through a spin cycle in the washer, then spread them to dry on a beach towel. They still had way more specks of grass etc. in them than I wanted, but I figured this would be as good as it gets.

Well! When it was dry, I carded it (on borrowed hand-carders), and almost all of the flecks of foliage ended up on my lap. The wool is white, lofty, and just calling to me to be spun!

If you're new to a drop spindle, or if you've always itched to spin but haven't the budget for it, here are a few tips:

1. Borrow Abby Franquemont's excellent book, "Respect the Spindle" from your library (I got this one through inter-library loan!). Read it!

2. Make yourself a drop spindle using a wooden toy-wheel, a piece of dowel, a small hook, and some wood glue. A bit of sandpaper is handy, too.

3. Procure a fleece...ask around! Although the world's economy was built on wool at one time, fleeces are pretty much worthless (read: FREE) now (the shearer told my husband that it would cost him money to transport it to the processing plant).

4. Clean it (you can follow my dodgy method or find better tutorials on youtube). Use onion bags if you don't have lingerie bags. Be resourceful. Women have been spinning on spindles forever, and didn't need fancy, expensive tools to do it.

5. Card the dry wool. Guess what? You can even use dog brushes (the kind with wire-bristles) if you're in a pinch. I learned this by asking a friend's mother, who happens to be a master-spinner.

6. Play, and practice! It's not about the product, at this point. I may create some silly hat with all my funny balls of yarn, but it's not the point right now. The focus is on the process, not the product...which makes it fun!

There you have it. My first forays into spinning. When my children get older, I'll hopefully find time to take a course or two, and will start saving for a wheel as quirky and unique as I am. Until then, never fear: my hands will not be idle for a moment as they spin balls and balls of imperfect yarn.

::this moment::cat whisperer::

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the tomten's little sister

At first I thought she was an apple blossom fairy. Then when I got the whole picture: the barns, the boots, the cat...I realised she is more Tomten than fairy. She is the Tomten that visits in Spring, and whispers to all living things that winter is really and truly over.

She twirls and giggles and poses, and wrestles with the cat. She wields an apple branch like a wand, and wonders about her shadow. She climbs fences and perches on steps.

Delightful girl!

hey, jude

Hey, Jude.

Jude River. 

He's turning eight today. His wiggly baby teeth give way to giant Chiclet teeth that seem too big for his face. Freckles jostle for space every time he goes out in the sun. His hair is thick and dark, as it promised to be when he was a newborn. Those eyes...grey-green, ringed by black lashes. He winks back at me and my heart squeezes, imagining the loves he'll find in his life thanks to those eyes. 

His legs grow more quickly than I can find jeans to fit him and I am thankful that the season for shorts has arrived. He dresses in his own quirky way: tweed caps, cowboy boots, knitted sweaters, neckties. He plays with Bionicles for hours, making battle sounds. He takes a long time to figure out how to play games, but loves to play anyway. He loves to be outside, sword fighting and bike-riding and tree-climbing. He wants to be a farmer or a ninja or a step-dancer or a soldier when he grows up.

He loves to dance. We sing Gangnam Style phonetically now, and know all the moves. He makes up new routines and shows me his creative moves daily. He draws complex pictures that he needs to explain to me, aliens and deep-sea kings, guardian warriors and robots. They're full of movement and sound and his pencil can hardly keep up with his ideas.

He sets up cohorts of tiny Roman soldiers, lies on his tummy so that he can have them at eye level, and I know in his mind that he marches off to conquer with them. His body never stops moving: headstands, somersaults, playful kicks in the butt, cuddles. He likes to read now, although he was a late-bloomer. He takes pride in helping me with his little sisters by reading to them, getting them a snack, or holding the baby. He laughs his head off when I pretend that Norah is kung-fu-kicking him in the face, or when I do baby-voice overs as she gnaws on his robots (I AM A GIANT BABY. I WILL DEFEAT YOUR ROBOT ARMY WITH MY POISONOUS DROOL!)

He tells me the truth about everything. He confesses immediately if he gets in trouble at school, and owns up to the quirky things he does even though we've told him a million times (since he was two) not to: turning up the thermostat, or squirting window cleaner all over the place). He hates time-outs and getting in trouble, and is just starting to get the concept of impulse control. When I do send him to his room, he lowers angry notes down through our heat-vent, tied to a string ("Be Quite, Mom"). I bite my lip so I don't laugh.

He's a great traveller, and eats anything we feed him. He brings his gluten-and-dairy-free food with him to birthday parties and never complains that he eats different stuff from his friends. He cries at the sad parts of movies, and hides his eyes during the scary parts. He occasionally wonders why he's the only one in his class without a Wii/DS/i-pod but accepts our family values. He has no concept of time or money. He wishes he could go on a sail boat, an airplane, in the ocean. I promise him that someday, he will.

He loves to spend time alone with me, his made-up jokes make no sense, and he is the joy of my heart.

I tell him that I always hoped I'd have a son just like him, that he is the fulfillment of a dream I held for many years. He looks just as I imagined a son of mine would. Sometimes I don't get him, but I got him. He's mine, for a little while at least, and I surely am grateful that he is.

Happy Birthday, Jude River!

for the young field naturalist

This beautiful linen was begging to be made into something lovely. So, I created three field naturalist bags, lined with lovely green-and-white-striped cotton, complete with a notebook, pen, field guide, and themed patch! Perfect gifts for the three birthday girls who invited Violet and Margot to their parties this past weekend.

In case you're thinking, "How does she find the time?", let me say that there is much hair pulling and teeth-gnashing in this house as I stubbornly insist on handmade gifts. I stay up too late, I curse the sewing machine, I call my mother for advice, and I book time for my husband to take over with the kids so I can create. And my kids arrive late to every party because I sewed up to the very last second.

That is how I do it.

I thought that maybe having a fourth child would cure me of my insistence that handmade is nicer, but somehow it hasn't. When I picked Violet up from the second party, the birthday girl was running outside in a herd of kids, with her bag slung over her shoulder. She proclaimed that she would find every single bug in her field guide by the end of the summer!

And that is why I do it.

mix tape's a masterpiece

I hang on to the best of the mixed tapes I've received over the years. The very, very best came from a friend I had in Belfast; I still keep it with me in my van though I'm afraid to listen to it now. It is 18 years old, after all, and a treasure. 

I remember cuing up all the cassettes I was using to make a mixed tape, calculating how many minutes each song would take so as not to go over the 45 minute-per-side rule (I hated when the tape ended in the middle of the song). 

As I recorded each song, I'd write notes about why I'd included it on the tape. I'd decorate the liner to personalise the gift. The endeavour of making a mixed tape was always a labor of love, a task that required creativity and time. Whole rainy afternoons and every feeling in my teenaged self would go into their creation.

Well, 20 years later, and the mixed tape is a thing of the past. I click and drag to create playlists, and burn them on to CDs. It takes minutes, really.

When I reconnected with Nic, I wanted to reignite our shared love of music. I created a playlist for him, and was inspired to recapture the nostalgic charm of the old mixed tape. 

Here's what I made! It's a B-side, of course, with blue thread reminiscent of my high school blue ballpoint pens. This CD case is three layers of felt to contain the two CDs it holds. It will be on its way to Wales this week!

::this moment::barefoot breakfast::

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