My first spinning wheel

Today I am grateful for my mother.  Besides the usual things that every mother does for every child, my mother shared her enthusiasm with me.  She is a woman of many talents and interests and projects.  Currently she is involved in quilting - not just for herself, but for others.  She makes quilts to give to others who need warm bedding in her community and abroad.  She teaches others how to quilt and opens her home to a church quilting session at least once a week.  Then there are the good deed quilts - quilts finished for others who started them, but can no longer work on them.  She has been a leader in her church and community wherever she lived.  She assumes everyone is as excited as she is about whatever the current project is - quilt, park, blood drive, 4th of July parade, whatever.  You just can't say no to her, so you end up involved.  Enthusiasm is contagious and she spreads it everywhere she goes.

Thinking abut my mother reminded me of how I came to spinning. ( No, my mother doesn't spin.)  She and my dad came to visit me while we were living in Monterey, CA.  There was a Highland Games festival while they were there, so we went.  (My dad has Scottish ancestry.)  While we were there we saw some craft demonstrators with drop spindles spinning yarn.  I found it fascinating and commented that I would like to learn to spin someday.  "Well, you should have grandma's spinning wheel then.  I'll send it to you." said my mom.

My grandparents built a cabin in the Wind River mountains in Wyoming.  Sometime on their travels somewhere in eastern Canada they picked up a spinning wheel, purely as a decorative piece to put in the cabin.  As a child I remember treadling that thing for all it was worth to see how fast I could make it go.  All the grandchildren did.  I never saw anyone actually spin yarn on it.

When my parents inherited the cabin, they brought some of the more breakable pieces back home, including the spinning wheel.  A couple weeks later it arrived in the mail, in pieces.  My dear husband sanded the stained places, figured out how to put it together, and voila - I had a spinning wheel.

In Pacific Grove, the town next door, I found a spinning & weaving shop, and signed up for lessons.  At my first class I found out that I was very lucky.  Most antique spinning wheels don't work - most don't even have all the pieces.  I couldn't have told the difference.  But mine did have all the pieces and it would work, for the most part.  My teacher taught us where to oil the wheels (where all the stained places were.  I hated to tell my husband that I had to stain all those places back again.), how to adjust them, and what the different parts did.  Then we learned how the draft out the fiber and spin yarn while we treadled.   I was not a natural.

Most of the students had Ashford wheels.  They were the most common around and there weren't too many other kinds available then.  They had a nice medium sized orifice - good for spinning nice beginner Romney wool into irregular, overtwisted beginner yarn.  I learned that I had a flax wheel with a very small orifice good for making linen thread.  I had to draft my yarn much smaller than anyone else in order to get it to go through the orifice.  My yarn was overtwisted and irregular, but it was thin because it had to be. 

I could only practice at home for 15 minutes at a time because I got so frustrated.  Besides the small orifice, the wheel was warped just a little, so every once in a while the cord would jump off.  I would have to stop spinning and put everything back together again.  I did learn how to adjust my wheel though.  Little by little, I became more adept.  I had skeins of yarn all over the place.  I couldn't get enough.  I was a real spinner.

Trail Mix

Today I am grateful for ribbon.  It comes in an infinite variety of colors and patterns and sizes,  all useful and decorative.  I need things to be functional, otherwise they are just taking up space.  I have a few doodads that just sit there and look pretty, but not too many.  Their function is to bring back memories for me.  Ribbon can decorate just about anything - presents, clothing, balloons, quilts, you name it.  It's flexible , yet strong enough.  I have a box full of it that I save, even the little pieces.  You never know when it will come in handy.

I was assigned to make snacks to take to a meeting so I decided on Trail Mix.  I looked on the internet for recipes, but none were just what I wanted.  There are things I like in a trail mix, and things that I don't like.  I don't like filler and little stuff that falls to the bottom - like sunflower seeds, oatmeal, marshmallows, and coconut.  I like them for other uses, but not trail mix.  What I do like is fruit, nuts, and a little chocolate.  So here is what I came up.

Fawn's Trail Mix

1 cup dried cranberries
1 cup dried blueberries
1 cup dried cherries
1 cup dried apple pieces
1 cup dried apricots (cut in quarters)
1 1/2 cups peanuts
1 1/2 cups cashews
1 1/2 cups almonds
1 cup chocolate chips
1 cup peanut butter chips
1 cup butterscotch chips
1 cup white chocolate chips

Mix it all together in a large bowl.  Store in an airtight container or a ziplock bag.

I could have just bought something at the store, but that wouldn't be as tasty and it would contain one more thing that I don't like - preservatives.  It turned out pretty good -- sweet, salty and a little chocolate.

My first garden

Today I am grateful for sunshine.  We have had several days of rain, and clouds, and fog, and generally gloomy weather.  It is winter, after all.  But today around 11:00 the clouds melted away and the sun came out and cheered everything up.  Sunshine is so uplifting.  I had to go for a walk just to take it all in.  In the middle of July, I'm not always so grateful.  But in January, sunshine is a wonderful thing.

Today I looked at my vegetable garden and starting planning what I want to grow this year.  In January all things are possible.  Plants will go in at the right moment, seeds will be planted on time, the weather will cooperate, and the garden will be filled with tasty produce.  We'll see what happens.  But I think some spring vegetables - spinach, snap peas, maybe something else - might go in next week.  Just to see what happens.

It made me think about the first real garden that I had.  We had purchased our first little starter home.  It was at the end of a cul-de-sac, so the yard was wedge shaped.  The front yard was small, but the back yard was quite large.  I loved it.  Even though there was a steep slope, it was great for a garden.  I had to terrace the rows, but that was kind of nice.   I started seeds inside, and as soon as the weather was warm, out they all went into the garden.  I had tomatoes, beans, cucumbers, squash, snap peas and sunflowers.  I would go out every evening and weed the garden while the children played in the yard.  I was in heaven.  I even canned tomatoes and beans to save for the winter.  I felt so domestic.

I wonder how things will grow this year.  Growing a garden is always a risk, but the rewards are worth it.  There's nothing like just picked vegetables.

30 year old wool - spinning on TV

Today I am grateful for chocolate. Most women are.  Some men too.  I got a chocolate cookbook for Christmas.  I don't even have to make anything out of it.  Just reading the recipes makes me feel better.  But I will make some things, just to make sure they are as good as it sounds like.  Chocolate can make everything better somehow.  Actually, scientists can tell you how, but I prefer just to think of it as magic.

Today I am going to tell you about an amazing experience I had last fall.  I had started carding the colors when my mother came to visit.  I was excited to show her what I was doing because she had given me the wool in the first place.  So we spent one afternoon on the porch carding wool.  It was fun.  The next morning the weather was great, so we went back out on the porch to spin the yarn.

We were enjoying the day.  I was spinning away when a car pulled up in front of our house.  It had the call letters of a local TV station splashed all over the side.  Two guys got out and walked up to the porch.  I thought they would ask us for directions or something.  (Just to clarify things - our town has a yearly festival, like all small towns are required to do.  Ours is centered around Oliver Hardy, who was born in our town.  The festival would be the next day.)  But no, they were looking to film a color piece to tie in with other things they were doing in regards to the festival.  What on earth was I doing, and could they film me while I did it?

This all seemed very strange to me, but I love to get more people interested in spinning.  So I said, "Sure."  I took the main guy into the house and we looked at hand spun yarn that I had laying around and a couple shawls.  He said those would be great and we took them back outside.  "When would we be doing this?"  I asked.  "Right now."  Seriously?

Because we were going to go out on the porch and spin wool that contained lots of debris despite the carding, I had dressed in my oldest jeans and a ratty old T-shirt.  I hadn't had a shower yet, no makeup, hair was leftover from the day before.  This was pretty much the worst I ever looked unless I was sick.

The guy said I could go put on some makeup if I wanted, but it would take me a couple hours to make any real difference.  I thought about it a minute.  I knew how these things really go.  They film all kinds of stuff and then show about 10 seconds in the real broadcast.  I just couldn't take it too seriously.  So I said, "Let's just do it."

So they put mikes on me and my Mom and I started spinning and they started filming.  The main guy asked us questions and we talked to him and the camera guy filmed different things.  I wasn't nervous because I didn't think anything would come of it.  Normally, doing anything in public makes me very nervous.  Very, very nervous.  It all took about half an hour.  They finished up, told us to watch the 6:00 news that night, and were on their way.

We had planned to go out to eat that night, so we put on the DVR to record the 6:00 news and left.  When we returned we decided we better watch and see which 10 seconds they decided to put into the broadcast.  I was very surprised to find they had done a remote broadcast from downtown and they were using a clip of my hands spinning as a teaser between every segment.  "Stay tuned to see who is spinning a yarn."  My portion was at the end of the broadcast and they used most of what they had filmed.  I got more time than the biggest industry in town - a pecan factory.  It was crazy.

I learned a lot from this adventure.  Don't take things too seriously - they turn out better.  And you never know what might happen.  However, I haven't spun out on the porch again since then.

Here's a link to see the film at 6.

http://www2.wjbf.com/news/2011/oct/01/out-theresomewhere-harlem-womans-sp-57298-vi-104965/

30 year old wool - carding

Today I am grateful for books.  Some people think they are old-fashioned, but I like old-fashioned things.  For hundreds of years they were the way you got information or entertainment.  I still like the feel of a book.  I like going to the library and looking at the covers.  (They say you can't judge a book by its cover, but actually you can.  Good artwork still stands for something.)  I like turning the pages and putting a real bookmark in to save the place.  I really enjoy real things.  (Don't get me wrong.  I love electronics.  I have an ipad that I read books on when I travel.  But it's not the same.  I think there is room in the world for both.)

Now on to the story of our wool.  Once all the wool was dyed, it was time to start the carding.  Each of the twelve bags had to be carded.  I teased each bag and then put it through the carder 3 times.  Each bag yielded 4 batts.   I worked outside on my porch during the nice fall weather.  Each color took most of an afternoon.  It was so nice to hear the birds and see what was going on in the neighborhood.  I like natural sounds when I work outside.

Now came the fun part.  I got all the colors out and decided which to mix together.  I didn't have enough to mix each with every other one, so I just picked what I thought would make the most different colors.  I saved one batt of each color to spin by itself.  The other 3 batts I paired with a batt of another color.  I tore each batt in half, saved one half of each color and carded the others together.  Now I had a batt that was a mixture of two colors along with half batts of each of the original colors.  There is method in my madness as you will see when we get to spinning.

30 year old wool - dyeing

Today I am grateful for rain.  Yesterday was cloudy and gloomy, but we got rain.  We have been in drought conditions in our area for several years now.  Rain is important.   I hope we get more, lots more.  Maybe our lawn will come back.  Maybe the garden will grow.  Maybe the lake will refill.  Lots of good things come with rain.

Continuing with the story of the 30 year old wool:  Once the wool was certified as moth-free, I tried to think what I should do with it.  I had recently bought a DVD by Deb Menz about carding different colors.  I had a drum carder;  I had dyes;  I wanted to play with color; and I had wool that could be used for experimentation.  So I decided a color project was in order.  I also had recently heard about dyeing with a crock-pot.  I enlisted my old crock-pot for the adventure.  (It forced me buy a new crock-pot, but some sacrifices have to be made.) 

First I mixed up a jar of dye from every color that I had - 9 in all.  (They are Lanaset dyes.)  Then I tried one batch in the crock-pot, just to make sure that it would work.  And to figure out how much wool could be dyed at a time.  It turned out that 2 ounces was a good amount.  So I weighed out the wool in 2 ounce piles and put each in a white kitchen garbage bag.  There were 12 bags.

Each day for the next 2 or 3 weeks I would wash a bag of wool, rinse it, mix up a color of dye, put everything together in the crock-pot and set it out on the porch to cook.  By the middle of the afternoon the dye would be exhausted, so I would turn the crock-pot off.  I let it cool down overnight.  Then in the morning I would rinse the wool, spin it dry in my washing machine, and put it to dry on my drying rack.  And start another color.  I loved seeing all the colors.  Of course, with 9 colors of dye and 12 bags of wool, in the end some mixtures had to be made.  But I ended up with 12 different colors of wool.  Wonderful.

30 year old yarn - the beginning

Today I am grateful for jigsaw puzzles.  I have been a puzzle lover since childhood. For as long as I can remember, I received a new puzzle for Christmas.  When I married and had to play Santa for myself, I continued the tradition.  I start my new puzzle on New Year's Eve and finish it while I watch football on New Year's Day.  Others may help.  Sometimes we have a lot of people celebrate the new year with us and sometimes it's just me and my husband.  This year it was just us.  My puzzle this year is one of my favorites.  It is of a painting by Kandinsky, Color Study of Squares and Circles.  I love all the colors.  It had 1500 pieces and it was harder than I thought.

Last spring while my husband was cleaning out the attic he found a forgotten box of wool that had been stuffed in the attic when we moved into this house 20 years ago.  It brought back a lot of memories. 

30 years ago when I was just learning to spin my mother wanted to be involved.  She lived out in the country and had neighbors who raised sheep commercially.  So she asked them if they had some wool she could send me.  It was shearing time, so they picked a couple fleeces off the shearing floor and stuffed them into a yellow plastic burlap bag and gave them to her. (Normally they shear all the sheep, stuff all the wool into big bags and send it off to the wool middleman.)

My husband's parents were coming to visit us with their 5th wheel trailer.  Since they are friends of my parents and live nearby, my mother asked them is they could take something to me when they went.  Of course, they said yes, expecting a birthday gift or book or other small thing.  They were taken aback when the something turned out to be a 5' tall bag as big as you could get your arms around full of dirty stinky wool.  They knew my mother well enough to know that you can't say no to her, so they stuck it in their trailer.  They were very relieved to hand it off to me when they arrived.

I was overwhelmed, and not in a good way.  The smell, the amount - it was all a bit much.   I read everything I could find, but there were no instructions on how to skirt a raw fleece in your living room with 3 small children helping.  (We lived in a second floor apartment - no yard, only a very small deck.)  And absolutely nothing on how to properly thank your mother for this type of gift.

I ended up spreading it all out on an old sheet on the living room carpet.  First I threw away all the totally dung-covered wool.  Then I divided the rest into different quality groups.  That's what the instructions I could find said to do, not that I knew what good quality was.  Then I stuffed it back into the bag and put it out on the deck.

I washed some of it by filling the bathtub with hot water and soap and putting in as much wool as I could fit in.  I let it soak for an hour or so, and then let the water out.  I held the wool back while I let some rinse water fill the tub again.  Then I let the rinse water soak for another hour or so.  Then I let the water out of the tub, squeezed as much water as I could out of the wool, and laid it out on a sheet in the living room to dry.  It was the best I could do at the time.  We moved soon after receiving the wool, so some of it had to be washed later at our new home.

The wool my husband found was some of this first wool to be washed.  It had been in white plastic garbage bags in a moving box that had never been open through 3 moves.  Would it be any good after all this time and poor handling?  I put it in quarantine in the guest bathroom for a month, just in case it had picked up moths, and decided that I would find something to do with it.

Could the wool be saved?