OMG, it's yarn!

When I left off last on the chronicle of this journey from sheep-to-socks I had just gotten the hang of spinning after months of frustration. Turned out the the root of the problem lay not only in understanding the mechanics of the wheel, but of spinning in and of itself.

Cakes of double-ply hand-spun yarn.

After taking Abby Franquemont’s spinning bootcamp class at Maryland Sheep and Wool this past spring, I sprung for her book, Respect the Spindle, to get a better understanding. Having both top and bottom drive spindles, I experimented, but cats and spindles had become an insufferable game of Battleship. I lost. After each being caught up once one way or another with the wheel, the cats steer clear when I sit in the rocking chair and start to treadle. 

My summer and fall were spent spinning a variety of professionally prepared rovings as they were much easier to spin than my nep-infested roving from the ram. Spinning with a higher quality wool also gave me the win needed to keep me moving forward. 

With all available spindles full, it was time for a plying lesson. This stage presented itself perfectly as I was able to pair it with an alpaca neck roast dinner with my fellow fiber enthusiast and teacher. She keeps camelids; I do not but was at my butcher’s on a day when a four-year old female who failed to breed was being slaughtered for meat. “I want the neck roast,” I chirped. A few swift cuts and I was handed a four-pound slug of meat.

Alpaca: it's what's for dinner.

After our meal we began by transforming a bobbin’s worth of single-ply into a cake using a gadget she had brought along. A quick lesson on cake-winding completed, my hand-spun wool was starting to look better. Unfortunately, that feeling would be short-lived once I began plying from a cake and encountered “yarn barf”, the not-so-technical term for when a tangled rat nest emerges from the center-pull yarn of the cake requiring mind-numbing patience to unravel before continuing to ply.

Plying, for the uninitiated, is when multiple strands of single-ply yarn are twisted together using the wheel. Plying from the ends of a single cake is a bit of a work-around for not having multiple bobbins set up on a holder (a.k.a. lazy kate) to feed into the orifice of the wheel.

The second gotcha, much easier to overcome than most of my challenges thus far, was remember that the wheel spins counter to the direction in which the single-ply was originally spun. I spin clockwise so my plying would be counter-clockwise.

Lazy Kate

My cake had a bad case of food poisoning and puked the entire time during my first attempt at making a double-ply yarn. It was during this time I had the realization that if I had spent the time spinning a second bobbin of the same roving in order to ply using a lazy kate,  it would have been faster. Instead of falling victim to the frustration of untangling for hours I spun a second bobbin of a project using purple and green rovings I purchased last year on my trip to New Hampshire.

Another yarn barf while plying from a single cake.

During the spinning I had alternated between the two colors in an attempt to create a variegated yarn when plied but realized my error. I should have spun whole bobbins of the same color and then plied them. I’m cool with the learning process and my finished double-ply yarn turned out better than expected. 

After plying it was time to wind the yarn off the bobbin using a gadget made from some wooden dowels and plastic T's called a niddy noddy. Who comes up with these names?

Using a niddy noddy allows you to gain a better ideas of how much in length the finished yarn hank is. While on the niddy noddy I tied the hank in four places before removing the yarn and soaking it in warm water for a half hour. Similar to the felting projects, the yarn needed fulling which is basically thwacking the hell out of it while damp against a hard surface. When the yarn hank had dried I wound it back into a cake using the gadget my teacher has left with me since she got herself a newer, much fancier unit. 

Plied yarn on niddy noddy. 

With several empty bobbins I’ve returned to spinning the ram’s fleece from which my goal is to make a pair of socks. The roving isn’t as easy to spin as professionally prepared fleece, but I’m working through it.

In the mean time, I started a simple knitted scarf project with my purple and green double-ply yarn and am attempting a pair of socks from purchased yarn, however Judy’s Magic Cast-On is more like an evil spell cast upon me straight from the devil himself. Note to YouTube instructors: slow down so we can see what you are doing and don’t cast on five stitches and then move on. Do it over and over and over slowly so challenged folks like me can get the hang of it.

I’m still having fun felting here & there and would love to try weaving, but not until my socks are done. 

One step closer but back to the wheel for now…. 

A felted picture from a class I took over the summer. 

Investing in my Craft

When it comes to new hobbies, I tend to be conservative in my financial investment until I know this is something I truly want to pursue. Since embarking on this journey of Sheep2Socks my biggest investment has been time thanks to the generosity of friends from whom I have borrowed equipment and picked their brains. Given the proximity of the Maryland Sheep & Wool Festival--one of the pilgrimage stops for fiber enthusiasts--I decided to take a class. Mind you, this was back when I was still spinning wool breakfast sausages in abject frustration.

"The classes fill up at lightning speed," I was told by everyone. So I treated it like trying to get tickets to a popular concert, my finger hovered over the BUY button at the appointed time that EventBrite opened online registration. I sat in the van after market waiting for 2:00 PM. 2:00 PM came and went with no change to the event status. 2:02 PM, "Damn, I need to refresh the page to get it to work," I thought stupidly to myself. Four spots left in the class. Buy. Checkout. Pay with PayPal. Success. I had scored a spot to Abby Frankquenmont's Spinning Bootcamp and I felt like I had just scored front row tickets to Hamilton.

In the time between signing up for the class and the day of the class I had finally gotten the hang of spinning, but the mechanics and lingo were still swirling in the ether of my mind. What was all this about twist everyone talked about? I just knew that my roving was passing through my fingers and on to the bobbin as the wheel spun around.

The day came for class and I put on clothing without horn holes or farm stains and headed south of the Mason Dixon. I thought the class would be at the fairgrounds, but the address led to a convention center at a golf course a few miles past the fairgrounds. Parking the van between a Porsche and Masserati, I hauled out the borrowed Ashford and headed to find the class.

There were eighteen participants, including myself. Women of all ages and a token male. There was an assortment of traditional wheels, both Castle and Saxony, and a few e-spinners, including the instructor's which had a tachometer her performance engine mechanic husband had installed for her so she could prove a point in an online slap-fight with another spinner. Who knew it could be such a competitive arena?

One of the main reasons I chose this class was for the instructor's personal experiences as the child of cultural anthropologists studying textiles in Peru. I knew this chick was going to be as interesting as she was informative. An excellent instructor in spinning as well as history, economics, design and mechanics, Abby is also an opinionated woman; I felt right at home.

Also the wife of a performance car mechanic, Abby was able to explain the technical aspects of spinning in terms with which I was familiar. What held interest for me, though, was the idea that textiles were an act of independence.

You ever notice how when you take up an interest in something it tends to begin popping up everywhere? So there's this wonderful conversation with a group of people about spinning for fun versus necessity.

The following month I listened to Jefferson's Daughters: Threee Sisters, White and Black, in a Young America by Catherine Kerrison in which it detailed a number of issues that were discussed in the workshop. At the time of the Revolutionary War most textiles were imported from England. In the struggle for independence, domestic textile production became an act of rebellion. Founding fathers who were also farmers and plantation owners planted flax, cotton and hemp to be transformed into cloth onsite. Young slave girls not yet capable of working in the fields were put to work in small mills processing fibers, spinning and weaving. Young women of the house were traditionally gifted a fine spinning wheel for their 16th birthday although their spinning was limited to the finer wools that were gentle on the hands. Despite Sally Hemming's children to Jefferson were still slaves, he rewarded them with positions of relative ease compared to that of the other slaves. For instance, one of Sally's daughters worked in the textile mill, but she was only allowed to spin wool and was able to remain at her work in the mill far past when most girls were sent into the fields.

Another take-away from the workshop dealt with the physical and mental mechanics of spinning. Instead of spinning for hours and hours to learn a particular skill, Abby suggested just fifteen minutes at a time and then sleep on it so the brain can process what the hands had done. Instead of sitting for an hour to spin and getting up stiff, I now break up my spinning time into ten or fifteen minute increments during the day.

The big break-through came when I began switching from spinning my nep-infested (nep is a new word meaning small knots of fibers that are a result of second cuts during shearing) to professionally carded roving. The first win was with a tie-dyed colored ball of Merino gifted to me by one of my regular market customers. Working with variegated roving allowed me to see the twist thus understanding the dynamics I had been missing until then.

Then I broke into the bag of gorgeous roving given to me by my chicken processor's mother. "Take this, I'll never use it. It's been taking up space in my closet for years," she said handing me a bag of mystery fiber and a huge box of locks. Only after Abby's workshop did I realize the value of her gift. The mystery roving was the color and consistency of an old biker's beard, but the long staple (meaning the length of individual fibers) made roving flow through my fingers.

Now I felt comfortable to begin to experiment with different tension settings and the speed of the flier.

The shearer has been here which means I've been on this humbling journey for a year now. Things I though would be easy have required much practice and patience. With all of the bobbins I possess now almost full it's time to move on to the next step of this process--plying.

Stay tuned......

She was more than just a cat. She was my friend.

RIP Megs

It is with great sadness I enter spring this year with the loss of Megs the Merciless, my feline companion for over twenty years. Yeah, I know, that’s old for a cat. And some people will say, “It’s just a cat,” but spend that much time with something/someone sharing your bed, hogging the pillow, stealing the covers, being there each night when you go to bed and greeting you first thing in the morning…you get a little attached.

Megs came to me as a tiny kitten while I was working in the IT department at Elixir Technologies. She was so tiny with her barely perceptible squeak I said she was only a megabyte and the name stuck.

At the time I was living in a funky 1950’s era mobile home smack dab in a citrus and avocado orchard. Critters were everywhere, especially rats, mice and opossums. My two-legged house mate had issued a NO CATS edict, but the vermin were outmaneuvering the traps and poisons, coming into the bathroom through the spaces between the floor and the pipes, raiding my Tampax box for bedding they shredded in the walls at night while we were trying to sleep. It was a losing battle with us on the wrong side.

Shopping at a neighbor’s yard sale one day we spied a rat-sized live trap. “Why are you selling this?” asked my anti-feline companion.

“We got a cat,” was there reply so the cat ban was lifted.

The next day at work came an office wide email—Free Kittens. It was meant to be. The next day I arrived at my desk to find a mewing tabby in a cat carrier next to my CPU. She went home with me and has remained my faithful companion until today.

From the very beginning, Megs was a hunter. Even though the orchard rats were bigger than she, lizards under the carport were her first quarry. She didn’t even kill them, just grab them by the tail which popped off as a natural escape mechanism. When she finally grew into her glory, she would bring several offerings a day to the front door—rats, mice, bunnies, snakes and once a raccoon kit. She avoided hawks, owls and coyotes. 

For two years her best friend was Rosa, a black Lab puppy we were raising for the National Disaster Foundation. Rosa would run with a blanket upon which Megs would cling for dear life as her pal would leap off and on to the porch, the blanket flying with kitten in tow. Rosa would carry Megs around by the leg and be scolded for doing so, but them Megs would rub against the puppy’s mouth teasing her to take up their game again. During long walks through the orchard in the morning and evenings with the dogs, Megs would follow along racing up trees and ambushing the dogs. When Rosa left for her professional training, Megs was visibly depressed for several days over the loss of her friend.

When the time came to move across the country from California to Pennsylvania Megs won the award for the worst traveler. The horse had a trailer, the dogs had a futon in the back of the truck and Megs had a large dog crate with a cardboard box for a litter pan. She was none too happy and “sang” the song of her people for three thousand miles. 

Half way through the trip we stopped for a few days in Texas at my companion’s mother’s home. She was a dyed-in-the-wool cat hater capturing wayward neighborhood kitties in a live trap, tormenting them with hose and them calling animal control to dispose of them. Once, she clipped the whiskers off her next-door neighbor’s pet cat with a pair of garden shears out of spite while it was being held by the owner. I had made arrangements to board her with my horse at the local veterinarian’s clinic, but when I arrived she was turned away due to an outbreak of contagious cat disease. She had to go with us. Imagine my surprise when I woke the next day to find our host with Megs on her lap, a cup of coffee in one hand and a cigarette in the other. “I thought you didn’t like cats?” I asked hesitantly.

“I don’t,” she replied in her clipped German accent adding, “but this cat is not going to shit in my garden.” Megs sat there purring. Was it because she was out of her crate or because she had won over the cat-hater?

After ten days we arrived at the farm which was right on the road. I had visions of finding her splattered on the asphalt, but in all the years there she managed to avoid tragedy while numerous barn cats did not. She opted for the opposite direction, hunting down in the pines where there were plenty of bunny nests. Bush-hogging days were her favorites when she would pounce on moles, voles, mice and of course, baby bunnies exposed in the mowed grasses. She nabbed chipmunks, squirrels, baby groundhogs and once, a fledgling owl. Much to the horror of our bird-watching neighbors, she raided the bird nests in their ornamental trees grabbing one at a time, bringing it home to eat and then going back for another until the nest was empty.

Her modus operandi also got her into trouble with the farming activities when she chewed the heads off a few dozen turkey poults one year. While the initial loss was around a hundred bucks, had those turkeys grown up for Thanksgiving dinners they would have brought in well over a thousand dollars. It wouldn’t be the first time someone who slept in my bed caused thousands in damages. From then on during poult brooding Megs was unhappily confined to the house. Angered by this, she tore through a second-story window and escaped for another pre-Thanksgiving feast. We learned to Megs-proof the brooders.

Like our walks in the orchard, Megs

would tag along with walks around the farm with the dogs, the bottle baby goats, the calves and the horses.

A year into the farm in Pennsylvania I brought home a friend for her, Bugs. Megs was having none of it. They were mortal enemies for many years until a visiting dog grabbed Bugs by the neck violently shaking her. She lay on my bed for two days unable to get her bearings. I was afraid she was going to die. It was at the height of market season when I had three market days in a row over the weekend and not the funds, let alone time, for a trip to the emergency vet clinic. I came home to find Megs in bed next to Bugs with her tail draped over her once hated housemate in a gesture of comfort. Bugs recovered and the outright fighting between the two ceased.

Although a new feline friend was not to her liking, the first Great Pyrenees puppy—Sherman was love at first sight. They play racetrack around the house for hours at a time, bounding on to the furniture before falling together in a fit of exhaustion. Despite his enormous size, she was the one to play rough always going for his lips causing him to freeze while she retracted her needle-like claws. He would hold her down in his massive paws and lick her while she yowled, but she never physically protested. 

When Sherman was hit on the road in front of the barn one morning, Megs entered another depression like that of when Rosa left. She never became attached to any of the puppies to enter her life again and was equally indifferent to a tuxedo kitten rife with lice, ear mites and eye infection that was dumped in the driveway at four am one July morning. She tolerated Lucky, but neither played or fought with him.

One summer I thought I had lost Megs for good when she disappeared for nearly two months. An owl, a hawk, the road, a leg trap…who knows, she was gone. As suddenly as she had disappeared, she reappeared seeming none worse for wear, fat and clean, however, she seemed to stick close to the house. It wasn’t until the Amish family a few doors over were walking by one days when they noticed her sunning herself on the bench in front of my house. 

“Oh, there’s our kitty,” the woman said as her little girl rushed to grab Megs who eluded the child’s attempt. I explained that Megs was mine and had traveled from California with me several years earlier. She would not be going home with them. The woman was incensed I would do something so mean as to take away a child’s pet. I didn’t give a shit what she said, Megs was my cat. 

When a tame orphaned deer was left at my farm, Megs befriended Buttercup who would lick Megs' ears. Whenever the doe would see Megs, she would rush over to lick the kitty slick. I was fortunate to catch one of their sessions on video. 

 

Megs had a wicked sense of humor. She knew when someone wasn’t a cat or animal person, making it a point to win over their hearts or harass the daylights out of them until they left the property. Once, she shed a huge gravid tick the size of a lima bean on a friend with a tick phobia. She didn’t run when he tossed her off his lap shrieking at the top of his lungs. Each time he would visit, she would make a bee line for him, but for pet people, she could care less.

When I gathered up all the critters to move to a different farm four years ago, Megs only had twenty minutes to sing. She, along with Bugs and Lucky, were forced to share my bedroom and the master bath for a week until I opened to door to their new home.

The road was a quarter mile away. The house sat in the middle of a hay field. There were three porches on which to laze in the sun—one for each cat which suited them all just fine.

About a year into her third farm it became apparent Megs was aging. She could still catch and wolf down baby bunnies. She knew there was a mouse trap on the counter and would jump up when it snapped, stealing the entire trap to go and eat the mouse out of the bale wire. I found a stash of traps under my bed recently. But she wasn’t grooming herself. Tufts of excess fur were matting on her haunches. She was staring to shrink from her sleek, yet muscular self. I bought a pet brush and we learned to deal with it.

Another year went by and while her body continued to shrink Megs continued to hunt, to eat, to jump up and down on the bed. Her one eye grew cloudy with what else… a cataract! She was old. When the weight really began dropping off her I splurged on wet cat food, the nice stuff which she gobbled two cans each day. She could still hear because she would dance in excitement each time the mouse trap snapped, waiting for me to drop it in front of her to promptly gobble down. Even when she quit eating the fancy wet cat food, only licking the gravy off the chunks, she could still devour an entire mouse and not barf it up. I tried to entice her with raw chicken livers, another favorite, and she turned up her nose. 

This past summer Megs developed an ulcerated tumor on her side. The vet said she could sew it closed but it would require anesthetizing Megs and wouldn’t guarantee it would not open right back up. I didn’t want to take the chance and instead kept the open sore clean and medicated. It didn’t start to expand until about a month ago. Then it began to smell. I considered having her euthanized, but each time she would jump up on my lap showing no pain with a relatively clean sore. Then it began to ooze. The fur fell out around it. She quit eating altogether, but anytime I sat down she climbed up on my lap and purred. I knew the end was near. I would not terrify her by loading her into a strange carrier and taking her somewhere to be put down out of convenience for me. She was not in pain. She was not suffering. She was going to die on her own terms.

For the last few weeks she mostly slept, ate little and spent her time awake when I was around. Each morning when I would wake up, she’d be waiting outside of my door as I had to quit letting her sleep in bed with me when she refused to get out of the way when I rolled over. She tried to get as close as possible and I was afraid of squishing her. To be honest, the oozing sore was also something I did not want in my bed.

Last week, Megs had her celebrity fan moment when my neighbor’s brother gave me a ride to the mechanic to pick up my van after I had some maintenance done. He is none other than Dale Midkiff who played Doctor Louis Creed in the Stephen King thriller, Pet Cemetery. We had been joking about Megs smelling like Church, the cat-returned-from-the-dead. 

“Would you do me a favor, Dale? Hold Megs and let me take your picture,” I asked. He obliged, adding to hurry up because she smelled like death and he was going to puke.  I swore she smiled having played the part to a T. I placated Dale by letting him cuddle the house lamb which smelled like a wool sweater for a few minutes.

This morning when I woke up, Megs did not greet me at the bedroom door as usual. She was laying on the floor in the living room with Bugs at her side. They hadn’t laid like that since Bugs’ encounter with the nasty dog. Megs couldn't stand up. Her eyes weren’t focusing and the pads on her paws were ice cold. I wrapped her in a towel and a blanket and laid her on my bed. As I went about my work today, checking in on her regularly, I could see she was gradually shutting down, fading just as I had seen with my grandmother as her breathing grew irregular in her final hours of life, an occasional large inhale, a small squeak when I squeezed her paw or stroked her fur.  As a farmer, I know death isn’t pretty. 

In the early afternoon as her breathing grew shallow and irregular, I got a telephone call from an acquaintance who suggested I bang her on the head with a shovel or shoot her and get it over with.  I hung up, blocked their number on my iPhone and went back to ensure that Megs faded quietlyacross the rainbow bridge. 

Megs passed peacefully wrapped in her favorite blanket on my bed on the first day of Spring despite a snow storm. 

She likes to leave kitty tongue marks on butter left out and in the pan when grease congealed. Salmon skin was her favorite thing next to whole mice and she would be underfoot singing each time I opened a package of salmon. The vacuum cleaner didn't frighten her, but helium balloons were on par with evil clowns for her.  

On an impulse last Sunday, I purchased several dinner plate dahlia bulbs, something I’ve never grown. Megs will be buried in my flower garden next to the porch on which she loved to sun herself, the dahlias marking the spot. I’m certain they will be gorgeous and make me smile just as Megs did.

The Pests Patrol

No, I don't have bugs in the wool...well, kind of. Not bugs, but cats and this season's house lamb, appropriately named Purl. Since my spinning lesson last month in which I finally got the hang of spinning, I've tried to sit down at and spin a few minutes every day. Audio books, not so good, but Ottmar Leibert , UsefulTree or Ray LaMontagne--absolutely.

There's something meditative about settling in at the wheel, focusing on the mantra of pinch, draft slide and letting the mind go to become lost in the feel of the fiber as it passes through my fingers. I try to evoke images of the end product, a pair of thick socks that rise a few inches above the ankle, thick enough to pad my winter boots, especially the ones that snap into the bindings of my cross country skis, which sadly, I've only been able to use once this year.

I finished the gray roving and successfully spun it off the bobbin on the spindle to a storage bobbin. That new Milwaukee drill came in handy for more than just hanging gates. With trepidation, I pulled out one of the bats I carded from the Tunis ram's wool last summer and sat down in front of the wheel with an empty bobbin. Just like that, I was one step closer to my socks as the bat transformed into a full bobbin over the course of several days.
Since I did not scour the wool, using only a mild detergent, not all of the lanolin was washed out of the fiber. When I spin my own carded bats from the ram's fleece my fingers become soft as the traces of "grease" permeate my skin.

At the same time, I've been practicing knitting. I frogged it (rip it, rip it) at least a dozen times before mastering the German twist cast-on to prevent the gap when knitting in the round. I'm about done with a hat now in the final stages as I attempt to switch from connected needles to double pointed for the final few rows. Megs insists on helping making it all but impossible to proceed.

But tonight as I sat down to spin, the critters decided that it would be more fun to chase each other through the wheel as I treadled, to grab at the roving and to bat at the hook. Purl took it a step further, punching me on the legs with her nose as if to say, "Play with me! Give me a bottle!" Finally, she sat at my feet for a few precious moments as I realized the wool I was spinning was her grandfather's and some day in the not too distant future I will shear her wool, too, eventually spinning it into yarn and making something for myself or those I love. And that is the ultimate satisfaction of this journey. Onward to the next step...plying.

Pinch. Draft. Slide.

Those three words made months of frustration disappear as the white practice roving--nothing special--twirled into ropey sausages each time I sat down to spin. I felt I would never get the hang of spinning and my quest for sheep to socks would end in failure. Determined to give it another try with coaching from a friend who had first inspired me to take on this project, I invited my fiber friend over for a day. She brought her own wheel, a lovely Lendrum double treadle wheel. 

Once again she quickly diagnosed I was working with non-functioning equipment--a broken spindle on the Ashford and a loose footman on the Clemes & Clemes. Despite a dab of glue and an overall tightening of nuts and screws on my two borrowed wheels, she set me in front of her wheel, beginning an in-depth instruction as to how each part of the wheel affected take-up, the size of the spun fiber and the types of wheels.  I practiced treadling to understand the motion of just getting the wheel to spin consistently in one direction. With roving in hand under her watchful eye, she began drilling me--pinch, draft, slide. 

Pinch the fiber so the twist happens in front of my fingers and not on the entire string of fiber from which I was to pull the fibers held in the opposite hand--the drafting.  Working in the "triangle" as it was described, after the draft, my pinching fingers were to slide down the fiber releasing the twisted portion to be drawn on to the spindle. Pinch. Draft. Slide. Pedal. And like learning to ride a bike, suddenly the roving was spinning into yarn that actually looked like yarn. 

Once the glue dried on the broken bobbin, the Ashford was back up and functioning properly. I sat down in front of the wheel and over the course of a few hours spun an entire bobbin. Now I was back on the road toward my goal with a new enthusiasm. 

Next up after spinning will be plying, which is twisting two strands of yarn together in the direction opposite in which they were spun. This will involve yet another piece of equipment called a "Lazy Kate" however, I've been told that a shoe box and chopsticks work just as well. 

In the mean time, more woolmakers are being born.....