twenty two inches

Finally done the spinning. The first chapter of this journey has taken me just over a year. How did those pioneer ladies do it and make sweaters for their whole family? I guess other family members helped them but no one I know in my family seems to like spinning very much and think that it is crazy to do this kind of thing. I suppose I have the satisfaction of knowing that I did this all myself. Of course, the slowness of the endeavour was due, in part, to several other projects that called to me but I now have a large amount of grey itchy wool that shall be made into a sweater, god damn it. Five pounds of it.

So, one thing did happen that seemed to be a little bit of serendipity. It struck me as rather interesting, maybe even some kind of sign. When I had finished plying my wool, I only had 22 inches left over of wool between the two plyed bobbins and that has never happened to me before, that I had calculated so closely and had such a small amount left. I guess I was channelling the pioneer women as I watched the Young and Restless while I plyed.

My little cairn terrier Penny likes it too. She and my sheep tape measure are posing below with the twenty two inches of wool just to the left of the tape measure to show their approval. Now I just have to figure out which pattern I am going to knit. I knit up a practice square of the basket weave pattern and it looks pretty good.

I have posed the wool and the sample with my latest botanical obession, hens and chicks, aka houseleeks or sempervivum. Such a cheerful and low maintenance plant.  Don't they look nice planted in some old  army boots from the Salvation Army? At $2 for the boots, that was a good deal.

the people you meet

Back to reality from my lovely odyssey to Peru. I made some new fiber friends from different parts of the globe and they are all into knitting and weaving. Kindred spirits all.

One in particular -- Marilyn -- from the south of England, is an inspiring woman who embraces everything that the world has to offer. Her life is like a skein of handspun wool with all kinds of texture, color and variation. She made me feel lucky to have met her.

Marilyn is an alpaca farmer who also raises chickens. She explained to me all about the wonders of getting fresh eggs every morning, chickens who will hen peck a rooster to within an inch of its life, and how a fox will come back to the hen house once they get a taste for the chickens. I think if we ever can get our by-laws sorted out here in Canada, and can have chickens in our own backyards, I would love to try this kind of thing. Just a couple of chickens running through the backyard would be fun to add to my little menagerie of two cairn terries and a tabby cat. I can see my husband wondering about the wisdom of two feisty terriers and chickens as I write this.

Then there is the fact that Marilyn has a heart bigger than the Colca Canyon - the canyon in Peru that is bigger and deeper than the Grand Canyon. She has taken in three adults with Down's syndrome whose parents have died. What can I say about that? Those people are very lucky people to have someone like Marilyn on their side.

The last thing I want you to know about Marilyn is something she did for me. She bought her hand made sweater that she spun from her own sheep to show me in Peru. She hoped to inspire me in my own project fleece to finish the darn sweater that has been dragging on for a whole year. My energy for the whole endeavor -- endless spinning that is not finished yet -- has been given a shot in the arm by seeing her sweater. A soft yet sturdy creation of creamy southdown wool with intarsia flowers and a beautiful sawtooth edging finish on the bottom and at the ends of the sleeves. AND, she also gave me a pair of alpaca slippers that she spun from her own herd to wear when my feet were cold at night.

Marilyn, thank you for the heartwarming gifts of your slippers and your friendship.

ropa bordada

The Colca Canyon. At 3,800 meters above sea level, the place leaves you gasping for breath. Drinking lots of coca tea helps, as does chewing coca leaves with a piece of volcanic stone to soften the leaves. The whole endeavor leaves your mouth numb and gives you a bit of a buzz. I am here now and continuing on my fiber adventure in Peru.

I have bought some amazing hats from the ladies in the markets/mercados we passed along the way. And there are the little children who, for one sole, which is about 30 cents will let you take their picture. I saw a baby alpaca about 2 months old taking it easy on a table of tapestries that the woman was selling. I really do feel like I am part of a National Geographic special, it is all so different from what I am used to back home. What a turista I am!

This is the place where some of the world’s finest fibre comes from -- alpaca, llama and vicuna. There seems to be a debate about which is a finer fibre, vicuna or cashmere. All I know is the adorable animals, with their giraffe like necks, long spindly legs and their huge brown eyes, are very strange to look at and part of an endangered species. One vicuna scarf costs $500, so it is out of my price range. Then there are the three alpacas who are cutting the lawn at the guest house where we are staying. Much prettier than our regular lawn mower from Canadian Tire! I want them to come home with me.

I have seen so many beautiful fabics, all machine embroidered in motifs called ropa bordada. Most women wear these traditonal outfits to show that they are part of a group and have been doing so for the past 500 years or so. These outfits form their identity. They started using sewing machines to embroider the fabric the last 50 years or so. Who can say no to the modern convenience?

The full skirts of this outfit look cumbersome to me but apparently the skirt can be quite functional to their daily lives and looped up around the waistband, it can serve as a large pocket, that is handy to carry lunch to your husband in the field, taking groceries from market or sowing quinoa seeds.

These outfits cost a lot to produce and they also seem to be a form of status, much like designer jeans would be to me. There seem to be a lot of turistas buying the hats, passport, cell phone and digital camera holders with the ropa bordata on them so I suppose that is a good source of income for the folks from the Colca Canyon. It is all very interesting, this blending of traditions and cultures. I think the Peruvians have a lot of ingenuity -- selling us rich North Americans stuff for our technology toys!

a peruvian knitting lesson

Today was an amazing day. I am in Arequipa, Peru, celebrating my 20th wedding anniversary on a fibre tour. The company who arranged the tour is called Puchka Peru and we are here for three weeks. The highlight of the tour for me is the knitting lessons and I have signed up for 8 days. Above is a picture of my teacher Rufina, and while she does not speak very much English and my Spanish is truly marginal, I still am thrilled with the results that I am creating.

In Peru, they knit backwards from what we do and they knit on the purl side while looking at their work. They put the yarn around their neck to help them maintain an even tension, which tends to make one feel like they are being strangled -- at least that is how I felt. They also use bicycle spoke knitting kneedles with ends that have been filed down to resemble a crochet hook.

Then there is the cast on. I never did really figure it out. It was a complicated affair using two colors, two hands and one needle. I was all thumbs and very frustrated. I was trying to over- think it but I was fortunate that Rufina's assistant Gloria, took pity on me, and did help me quite a bit with it and once I got past the cast on, what we were doing made more sense.

I ended up producing about two inches of my bolsita or purse after 7 hours of work with lots of ripping out and getting my mistakes fixed by Rufina who has endless patience and good humour. We seem to be getting by with the words, "OK, "NO" and "Excellento". Above is also a picture of my doggie motif that I am making from a book on traditional Andean patterns.

I was thinking how beautiful and unusual Rufina's clothing was when a fellow workshop participant said that it was for show and they probably wear jeans like the rest of us folks when not doing teaching. So, they don't look like they are part of a National Geographic TV Special, I guess. This was further re-inforced when I saw Rufina sending a text message after the workshop. I don't know why this was suprising to me, but it was.

I hope I can finish my purse before I leave this yarn lover's paradise.

lemonade in lima

Above is a picture of the best lemonade I have ever had and I had it today in Lima, Peru. The taste is very different than what we are used to in Canada as the lemons grow from right around here. It is also made with fresh lemon peel and brown sugar. Rick and I each had our own pitcher and at $3 soles it only cost about a dollar a serving. YUM.

Lima is so very different than any city I have ever been in. A real contrast of rich and poor neighborhoods with 9 million people living here. I got a glimpse of the shantytowns of Callao that look like transport trailer trucks piled on top of each other that people live in --no windows, no electricity and running water -- when we were driving from the airport last night at 3 am. This is where the poor people live. You don't want to go there, ever, according to the guidebooks. It's funny, even with all of the poverty, there are tons of billboards and American fastfood restaurants everywhere. I have seen more KFC outlets here than in all of Ontario. Oh and there's Pizza Pizza, TGI Fridays and Starbucks too.

I am fortunate to be staying in the very nice area of Miraflores at the Hostal El Patio. Lovely, charming place with rooms off of a central courtyard with a fountain. The walls are festooned with all kinds of plants -- azealeas, bouganvillea, wisteria -- and so many more, but I don't know their names.

We also went to a very posh shopping district carved out the the cliffs on the Pacific Ocean called Larcomar. It was a controversial place when it was built as it took over a park. It is also full of very expensive shops with things that most Peruvians can never buy.

Let the fiber adventure begin!!!

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.