The Independent Stitch

Spinning Deborah Pulliam's wool

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

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?

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)

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

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

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.