the cat and the carder

I STILL have not gotten around to carding! I know that I should be doing it or I am never going to be able to spin my fleece and make the sweater but life (and tons of other projects) seems to be getting in the way. New socks have been started that are proving hard to put down, called Hypnosis, and spinning of assorted other fibres seems to be taking up a lot of time.

Then there is Daisy. She is a stray cat who has adoped us. She was abandoned at the garden centre where my daughter works and seems to like to sleep beside the carder in the garage. My guess is that she is about six months old and she is in heat as she spends most of her time walking around the house and crying to get out at all hours of the day or night. What ungodly noises a cat in heat can make. When my daughter and I are we are bored we try and make up a game to see what words from the English language her yowling sounds like -- hello, door and argon are some of the words she has said so far -- or maybe we are just going crazy with the constant noise and these are the voices in our heads.

We have an appointment to get her spayed next week.

The dogs are ok with her. Stewie growls as she walks by but I don't think he'd do anything terrible and Penny just rolls over on her back into her favorite submission pose when she walks by. I didn't really want to take on another animal as I think that two dogs are plenty, but my daughter has assured me that when she goes back to university in the fall, Daisy is going with her. I sure hope so...

Oh well, so that is my excuse for not carding for today; cannot disturb Daisy as she is "settling in". She is actually a very nice cat and is quite affectionate and doesn't bite or scratch when she isn't yowling. SIGH!

gather all ye fibre friends

Yesterday was Worldwide Knit in Public Day and it is held the second Saturday of June to encourage all of us fibre addicted people to get together and spread the word.

I was at my Local Yarn Store in Whitby -- Kniterary -- instead of knitting in public I choose to spin. We also brought non-perishable food items and put a square on the tree in the back of the store as a record of our participation. Thanks to Martina and Vicky for a lovely afternoon. Two other people brought their spinning wheels and their were also a number of drop spindles in action. Now that is something I'd like to master but haven't gotten around to yet...

I am currently spinning some lovely falklands wool from The Sweet Sheep called Harrumph. Upon the advice of another spinner, Heidi, I am going to try and make some socks with it.

I don't look happy here but I am ... just concentrating...

of montreal

I haven’t been able to work on my fleece all week but hope to get started on carding it soon. Every time I walk in my laundry room, I see it and I start to feel rather guilty. My lack of work on the fleece was because I went to Montreal this weekend for the Canadian Library Association Conference. It was a quick trip with only two full days there. I wasn’t really a part of the conference but I was asked to introduce a session about the Canadian Federation of Municipalites work in post tsunami Indonesia and Sri Lanka. It was a very interesting session and I am putting a link to the blogs written by Dawna and Katherine who went to Indonesia and Laura who went to Sri Lanka to help re-build two libraries in those countries. Talk about life changing experiences for them.

I did have an opportunity to visit one very nice wool store called À La Tricoteuse . There is a complete list of at least ten wool stores in Montreal found here, but I didn’t have time to visit them all. That is for another trip! I ended up starting out walking to the wool store from my hotel because MapQuest said that it was approximately 2 kilometres but I ended up walking more like 5 which took me a lot longer than I thought.

A light rain was coming down during my walk and I arrived at the store soaking wet at a quarter to five with the store closing in 15 minutes. The store was in a lovely part of Montreal, just north of the Latin Quarter and it was a very unassuming storefront painted in dark tones. I entered the store which was quite light inside even for a rainy day and very simply organized with all of the wool on big cubby holes in the wall. No stray balls of wool floating around here or baskets overflowing with handspun. I did see a madam sewing at a table in the corner of the store and she glaced up at me as I came in but continued on sewing. She had that certain French je ne said quois and was dressed all in black which made her match the formality of the store. I told her that I was looking for some sock yarn and started babbling on about being from Ontario and wanting some souvenirs for my afghan and she smiled and I guess she realized I was a serious customer. She pointed to a large whole section of sock yarn set up in the centre of the store arranged by color. I ended up buying quite a few balls of yarn for my sock yarn afghan as I want to add some bright solid colors in pink, yellow and orange to the rest of the striped sections. I also bought a large ball of blue yarn which has some aloe vera in it for my sore feet. $99 dollars worth of sock yarn. Yee gods!

I also finished my zig zag sock and knitted about 10 more squares for the afghan on the trip. All in all a very productive time with lots of good knitting karma. I like Montreal!

happy birthday vicky

There seems to be a bit of a misconception about Queen Victoria's Birthday. It is actually today, May 24th, and she was born in 1819 and lived to the ripe old age of 82 in 1901.

Queen Victoria was a big fan of knitted Shetland Lace and she knit herself. I stole this quote from the Yarn Harlot's page a day calendar. Sorry Stephanie, I didn't think you'd mind) and she took it from the New York Times, dated December 25th, 1898. It describes the sorts of Christmas gifts given by the Queen:

"There are comfortable woollen goods, sometimes made by the Queen's own hands, for she is fond of a little plain knittting. She uses large bone needles and double Berlin wool. It amuses her to make comforters and cuffs ready for Christmas presents, but it is only special favorites witin the roay family circle or among old retainers who are honored with these gifts."

Something else important to know about Queen Victoria is that she supported the knitting of socks by hand. Just before her birth was a time of huge labour unrest in England with the Luddites smashing sock knitting machines as a protest against low wages and rising prices and it would be interesting to see exactly how she felt about it all. I shall find out some more as I go along....

One interesting item that I did find out is that black and white silk stockings with hand crafted ornaments which belonged to Queen Victoria were sold in September of 2008 at an auction in Derby, England for 8,000 pounds (nearly 10,000 euros) by the Ruddington Framework Knitters` Museum from Nottingham.

Nice Socks!

three bags full

Well, it took me three days and I used the equivalent of 150 lingere bags and 30 runs of my hot water soak cycle and about 3/4 of a bottle of the Soak wash, but the fleece is done and smells great. Three lovely bags full. I split it up into the black parts and have two grey bags full. Now I just have to begin carding.

It is very interesting to me, this whole endeavor and how much time and money I have spent doing it myself. I checked the Wellington Fibre Mills fibre processing page. They only charge $1 per pound for each wash so I could have saved myself a lot of water and time by sending the fleece to them. It probably would have been about $20 to have it washed and it took me the better part of three days. But I wouldn't have had a chance to get my hands on all of the greasy fleecy goodness and its farmyard smell and I love that part about it.

The carding part will probably be even more discouraging as Wellington Fibres says they could card it for $9 a lb. So that means $45 for it all to be carded. I figure it is going to take me about 10 to 20 hours to card it. Say I get paid $25 an hour at my job, that means it would cost from $250 to $500 if I was getting paid my regular wages to card it. That makes no sense.

I guess fibre processing places must have all kinds of super fast machines that make all of the washing, carding and spinning a snap. I still want to do it all myself, just for the sake of it...I want to be a purist though from a time and economic stand point it really makes no sense.

Let the carding begin....

washing day - do NOT agitate.

Today I am going to start to wash the fleece. It is the Victoria Day Long Weekend and I hope that it won't take more than three days to wash 5 lbs of fleece.

For some reason, no one in my family seems to keen on helping me wash a giant bag of smelly wool. "It's so gross, mom", said my darling daughter. "Yuk, you are crazy", said my lovely sister. Oh well. That's their problem if they don't want to commune with nature.

Here are the fleece washing instructions I got from Donna, my fibre mentor and spinning teacher:

Take small amount of fleece and lay gently in your lingerie bags. Put hot water in your washer and use the small load setting. Set about 5 (Sorry, Donna, I used 10 bags at a time out of laziness) of your little bags in the water and pat them down gently do not agitate. Close lid to keep heat in and leave for about 45 min. Then turn to spin cycle and spin out. Remove and see if they are clean looking, if not repeat--use liquid soap--When ready to rinse put hot water in again and leave for abot 15 min then spin out as before. Lay fleece on a towel to dry.

Lingerie bags are purchased from Dollarama at 2 for $1. I also decided to use palmolive detergent as it will cut the grease well. I am going to use Soak for the second rinse. They have a new scent called "Celebration" and it is some kind of wonderful. It is nice because you don't need to wash it out and it smells fresh fresh fresh... now my fleece will smell like a walk on a country road. Ba ha ha.

Even though I love the smell of the fleece and all of its farmyard goodness, I guess it is time for it to smell like something else.

karma police

I have been thinking about Ghandi a lot lately. I went into one of the libraries I work in and started to read about his spinning obsession.

When he was in prison, he spent a lot of time spinning. He believed that the way for India to escape British Colonialism was to learn to spin cotton and make their own fibre.

I think he was really onto something here. If we spent more time spinning, which is so meditative and calming, there would be less time for violence, drugs, rampant consumerism and all of the other ills that seem to befall us.

There seems to be so much violence in the world, so much unhapiness and longing for other things. Spinning really teaches you to live in the moment while you are doing it.

Here is a Ghandism that I like:

I believe that the yarn we spin is capable of mending the broken warp and woof of our life.

I feel like when I am spinning a lot of my cares do disappear and I feel connected to something else, to nature, so another power different than myself and that is a good feeling.

For more things he said about his chakra or spinning wheel, visit

I am getting my fleece tonight and am quite excited about it