i have measured out my life on easter weekend

I have been thinking a lot about the passage of time lately and how I am using it while I am not at work. One of my favorite quotes about time is from T.S. Eliot's famous poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock". When he says, 'I have measured out my life in coffee spoons", I think he must be talking about the boring details of our lives that become routine after we do them every day. Like what I do every morning -- making coffee, letting the dogs out, letting the dogs in after they start barking at nothing and wake up the neighbors, giving the doggies their breakfast, checking my emails -- same old, same old.

I am starting to feel like this is a good mantra to use for my spinning of the sweater project. Lately, I have measured out my life in rolags spun. I have been doing so much spinning that my wrist hurts and there is still a large basket of them to do. On the positive side, I now have two large skeins of wool to use for my sweater and I have four other bobbins that will become skeins soon as they are plyed together. A tube of Ben Gay ointment has now become one of my best friends.

I wish I could say I like the stuff I am spinning. BUT, there is a big problem. The. Itchiness. Factor.

This unfortunate fact was confirmed when I proudly showed these two finished skeins to my daughter, and she said, "Wow, Mom, you sure have spun a lot of dog hair up! Talk about being crushed. The 40 or so hours of work this represents and she says it looks like dog hair. So, how will I make a sweater to wear out of this? What was I thinking?

Only 9 days until I leave for Peru. I don't think I will finish this sweater before then. At one point last year, when I started this whole endeavour, I had thought I would take the sweater that I made and show it to the folks on my fibre trip to Peru and hear their oohs and ahhs. The best laid plans....

some progress and sadness

Well, I am finally making some progress on the fleece and will be starting to spin in earnest soon. This progress comes in the form of rolags. A rolag is a roll of fibre made using hand cards that you can spin into wool. It looks a bit like a french roll in someones hair, truth be told. What a ton of work this was -- I estimate it has taken about 10 hours of time to get them all done. The good old drum carder I was using that I wrote about in an earlier post decided she needed to take a break from work. I guess she didn't like being called a battle axe. So, I used my nice hand cards given to me by my friend Nancy and they did the job. It seems somehow appropriate, I guess, with the endless grey days we have been having, to be dealing with endless grey rolags.

With the lack of sun, and endless grey rolags, I felt like trying to make something spring like. So, I made a wire bowl out of rebar wire and used some of my handspun mulberry yarn to hold it together. Then I took some little leaves from some teabags I got for Christmas to ebellish it. It made me feel like spring...

I showed it to the ladies at my spinning guild as I decided to donate it for a door prize for the upcoming seminar they have scheduled in October. They seemed to like it and want me to teach them how to do it. I don't think they were being kind either. So, now I will have to think about making more of these.

Today I would like to mourn the one week anniversary of the suicide of Mark Linkous, also known as Sparklehorse. His recording, "It's a Wonderful Life", is one of the prettiest and most haunting things I have ever heard. What a loss.

On a brighter note, I will be taking my trip to Peru in 29 days.

smudge the sequel

I wrote in an earlier post about my cat hair spinning adventure... and, the cat hat story is evolving. My friend Dawna is crocheting a hat for her boyfriend Dave but she has run out of wool. The darn handspun does not act the same as commmercial yarn and it seems to have a mind of its own. I am in the process of spinning more now and I hope to have it done so Dave can wear it this winter. Even though there has not been much of a winter this year. Here is Dawna modeling the hat and a closeup of the hat. It is very thick and feels so soft! It looks like it will be super warm and cosy. Pet hair is a lot warmer than wool.

My two little doggies, Penny and Stewie, love to smell the newly acquired fibre when it still has animal smells on it and above is a picture of them greeting the cat hair. I am afraid that Stewie is a bit camera shy and when he realizes that you are taking his picture, he starts to get very weird and tries to run away but I got a picture of him before he took off this time.

Notice I have not mentioned the fleece. I have taken another break and have lost a bit of momentum this week. I hope to return to it soon. Other projects seem to be beckoning. Like making a quilt from my father's old shirts and a bowl out of my handspun paper yarn....oh the crazy crafting life. Another deal will have to be made. Now that I have finished watching the reruns of Six Feet Under, I have decided that I can only watch the Young and Restless if I spin my fleece. Another pathetic crafting moment.

a rose is a rose!

I have added another child to the family, so to speak. Her name is Rose and she is a lovely girl. She is bigger than my first one, so I guess you could say a big sister to my first wheel. She was a birthday present from me to me, crazy huh! I am hoping she will be able to help me spin my fleece better and so far I am enjoying spinning on her. I am finding her a tiny bit easier to work on than the Little Gem, the smaller Wheel that I have, in terms of treadling her foot pedals. I had been looking at a few places to buy her and found the Little Red Mitten in St. Thomas. They had a very good price and Matt, the husband of Joan, who also owns the store bought it to me as he was attending a hocky game in Toronto.

It was a bit on the funny side, I think, as we decided to meet at Yorkdale Mall, one of the swankiest malls in all of Toronto. Here Matt and I were, sitting on the polished marble and oak benches, fashionable shoppers walking by with their purchases, while he explained the mechanics of my new wheel to me. I noticed a few people looking at us and I wondered what they thought of it all. I wonder if they even knew that we were talking about a spinning wheel. An old fashioned spinning wheel, abeit the latest in spinning technology from Majacraft, in such a place devoted to high fashion and consumerism. I think we spinners should set up in shpping malls and talk to people about spinning sweaters by hand and see what they think of it...

I almost have a bobbin full of my fleece and have knitted up a sample and it looks pretty good. I am a bit fearful of the scrachiness factor but am proceeding and am going to show it to some ladies at my spinning guild tonight to see what they think of it.

I also spun some angora rabbit fur with sari fabric on the wheel and have decided to ply it on the other wheel so she doesn't feel left out. I decided to put it in the muffin tin for artistic effect! I reminds me of a Monet painting somehow....

the carding camino

Happy New Year!

From January to June 2010 is my SLF. My self funded leave. I decided to take some time off from work and have been looking forward to it for over two years, but now I am not sure why and there is a feeling of anticlimax in the air. It is not really retirement, not really a holiday. My life is still the same -- still the same old errands to run, the same dog food to buy, the same driver's license to renew, watching the same dear hubby play solitare, the same old same old. The same grey January.What a whiner I am.

I wanted time and now I have it. But my fleece looms large. But instead of starting it on Monday like I thought I would, I organized my kitchen utensil drawer.

Something else did happen on Monday. I spent the aftenoon with my good friend and excellent writer Mooncattie and he gave me a gentle lecture and some inspiration. He told me that this time off was to be looked at as my personal Camino -- a journey at the start that you don't know where it will take you. There are all kinds of books about women discovering themselves on the on the six week walk of the Camino from Shirley Maclaine's crazy book where she gets pregnant with an alien baby to the recent bitchy henfest account about a bunch of women from Hamilton. Then there is also the one about the MBA who gets downsized and leaves rocks on the path. Many of the women seem to find true love (or alien babies) in the process. But I don't need to find love as I have my lovely hubby. And I don't need to find an alien baby. At one point, I was thinking of doing the walk, but the more I read about it, the more cliched it became. So how do carding and the Camino fit in to teach us about ourselves and lead us to self discovery? I don't have the answer to that one. YET.

So now my fleece seems like an insurmountable journey, like the Camino. It has been sitting in the basement, three bags full, for over six months. Getting compacted and less spinnable by the month - I am not honoring the fleece and not honoring nature in the process. Yesterday, I made a pact with myself. You can only watch your Six Feet Under reruns while carding. How pathetic. And how symbolic of our society is this -- rewarding yourself by watching tv and using the clever diversion of the stories of hollywood to take your mind off of your life.

I can see why machines have taken over from us as labour saving devices. Hand cranking the old gal of a carder pictured above for two hours is a lot of work. I looked at my book on carding and I see that I am overloading the machine it in my hurry to be done. This is not a process that can be rushed. It is time to slow down and not take things so fast -- I see this is symbolic of my life as I, like most folks I know, am always rushing about to finish things in a frantic mode and usually spraining my ankle in the process. Time to slow down and smell the flowers. Or, in this case, pick the vegetation out of the fleece and think of the fleece from a sheep named Aysia in Orillia I hope to become a sweater.

Anyway, I caught up on my show yesterday and I did some carding and ended up with almost 20 rolags to spin. Now I see how this will go. Card and spin. Card and spin. More to come as soon as my wrist recovers from the winding of the carding machine.

merry christmas to all and a fiber time tonight

Hello Everyone!

Here is what I got for Christmas from my lovely daughter. She took some pictures of my handspun and had them developed and put them in frames from dollarama! I think they look lovely...
My fibre studio (aka basement tv room) is growing bigger every day.

how soujourner truth became free

A pretty ferocious woman, all 5'11" of her. She was born as Isabella Baumfree in late 1790's in Swartekill, New York on Round Out Creek near where it joins the Wallkill River in Ultster County. A stone's throw from Rhinebeck.

Soujourner Truth ... She was a famous American abolitionist and a champion of women's rights. Her most famous speech is Ain't I a Woman? Here is her fibre story and how she freed herself as an indentured slave. Ulster County was known as a wool producing region, but this reputation rested more on the mediocrity of it's wheat than the wonderfulness of its wool. Her task to freedom was to spin 100 lbs of wool for her owner, Mr. Dumont, in order to become free. She was an excellent spinner and this task only took her 4 to 6 months. Her work as a slave came to an end in November or December of 1826.

I have been thinking about how this relates to me, with my nice basement spinning room, my new spinning chair, my fibre club subscriptions and my high tech wheel. She was an early femnist wanting to free herself from the chores of spinning and lower level of mindless work that spinning represented. Now, almost 200 years later, I am using the same activity that she wanted to get free from, to relax at the end of a hectic day. I now feel the pressure to spin my fleece, which lays in three bags in my basement but life has got in the way. I have too many emails to answer, too many knitting blogs to peruse every day, too much driving around Toronto to do my job in 12 different libraries, too many loads of laundry and too many other distractions. My husband says she wouldn't let watching tv shows like MadMen or Six Feet Under re-runs stand in her way. I think of Soujourner focusing on her spinning after a full day of her slavery chores and I feel not worthy, diminished in a way. But I am also inspired. If she can do it, so can I.