Spinning – Crafturgency

It has been some time since I last posted. Honestly, I wasn’t sure I’d ever post here again, and maybe this one will be the last? I don’t know. Life continues to poke and prod me towards thinking about what’s really important and how I should be spending my time. (Not scrolling!) I’m not sure if documenting this is important. It’s complicated and it’s also not.

I got into a car accident in February in which my car was totaled, I got a pin in my collarbone, two months in a wheelchair, and needed to rely on my friends for…an awful lot. I still can’t play the cello and stairs are sometimes tricky. I learned (again) how kind people can be. Catherine talked to me while I was stuck in my car until the fire department came to pull me out – I never saw her face and I have no idea where she lives, but am unbelievably grateful to her. People helped me bathe, go to the bathroom, stand on my good leg, braid my hair, fed me, took me to doctor’s appointments. It is July now and I have a car again (as of one week ago), I can walk, take care of myself, work both jobs, do a bit of gardening, spin wool, and cook. And the best thing? I’m alive.

And so.

In May, my friend Rachel and I went to the sheep shearing we go to every year 30 minutes north of me. It was a delightful sunny day, and the company was excellent. We had a lovely time and bought more fleeces than we had planned (of course). I bought three for myself and they’re all fabulously soft. Of course one is grey. Because of course. The following day, I pulled out handfuls and washed them, and when they were dry, I put them away for a time when I’d have a chance to spin them. I’ve been trying to make more time to spin because making is really my reason for being and I’ve spent years trying to make myself do the things I have to do (not making) so I can get them done faster and have my life back. This current way of life, bottling up all my making urges for later, isn’t making me happy. So I spent some time yesterday spinning a couple of those handfuls of wool and plied the grey this morning. While it’s not a totally even yarn, it is a very good yarn, and it is grey with a subtle sheen. I love it.

My dear friend E passed away from pancreatic cancer on June 9th. I mostly have two words for this: Fuck cancer. Two words that must be said in the rudest, loudest, ugliest voice crowned with spittle. E was 89, but if you saw her even two months prior, you’d think, this woman is amazing! She’s no where near her 80s. Look at her go! She’s hilarious! We got together once a week to walk the dog in the park, and after she was diagnosed a couple of years ago, I made it a priority to not miss a single time if I could at all help it. Every Saturday, I went over and we’d walk. When she couldn’t go for walks anymore, we’d have tea, and the teas became meals with five or six bowls and plates of little tasty things, a cheese board with four or five cheeses, crackers or bread, conversation, laughter, hilarity. Her brother would sometimes show up. Or her daughter. Her husband would join us. Sometimes there’d be a table full of people, telling stories, laughing, arguing, encouraging. For hours. Right up until almost the end. I miss her so much.

God damn. Listen: you have to wring every last bit of life – every last bit of joy – out of every minute, because one day you’re out of minutes and none of us knows when that day is going to come. As soon as I have a dining room table again and some chairs, I’m having people over for tea. There will be little bowls and plates of tasty snacks, crackers, a cheese board. It’ll be a regular thing.

So here I am making an effort at making stuff again. There will be fits and starts because my house is still a construction zone and will be for at least the next six months (hoping to finish by Christmas if I can scrape up the funds), and I have a full time job. Though I am really making an effort to sleep more and work a little less.

My first attempt at a galette. The crust is 80% almond flour, there’s a dash of wheat flour in there, some egg white, almond extract, butter, a couple of tablespoons of sugar, and the cherries are cherries. With a dash of sugar and cornstarch. I made it trying to keep the carbohydrates to a minimum because the event I was attending today would be populated with mostly diabetic folks and there was to be ice cream. This looked better than it tasted, alas. It needed whipped cream on or something, and the crust really needed a bit more sugar or something but considering I sort of made it up, I think I did an okay job. Also, now I have a cherry/olive pitter. I feel there may be some olive bread in my future.

(This was a draft I wrote in May of 2020 – today is April 17, 2024. So much has changed, but I’m going to publish this anyway, because it’s a fine post in itself, reminding me of The Before and all the things I was doing at the time.)

I tried very hard to get through that grey fleece I had bought from Balky Farm in 2019, but that didn’t happen. I did try, though, and that resulted in quite a bit of yarn.

Good yarn! Squishy yarn!

This time, I decided to measure and tag it. I have enough yarn that I swore I would remember which fleece it came from, how long ago I spun it, and how many yards there were. Good grief. And I have a terrible memory, and I know it. So. This time: tags!

You’d probably not guess that the fleece the above yarn came from was grey, but it was. It spun up brown, which I think I did not quite expect. Well, I did expect some yellowing from the sunburnt tips, but I didn’t expect brown. Not that I’m necessarily complaining! It’s still really gorgeous wool and made Really Good Yarn.

I also started combing some of that new! grey! fleece! that I washed up a small bag of.

So fluffy! So beautiful! And I wanted to do some experiments to see exactly how I should prepare this wool for spinning. So I combed some as they were, I combed some locks that had been flicked first, and I combed some locks that had their sunburnt tips trimmed off.

Combed fluff to spin! The color is off I think, but you’ll see some yarn spun up from it in sunlight, which is truer to the actual color.

Three tiny skeins!! So tiny. I spun each nest up, then Andean plied them (a technique that I very much appreciate now). The skeins on the right are probably closest in color. YOu can only just see the difference. The middle is the one with the tips trimmed, and while I was certain that was the one I was going to love the most, now I am not so sure. Oh yes, it’s grey. But it lacks a certain texture in the color. Or a layer of color. I’m not sure I can explain it. My eyes say that yarn is boring. And yet, I look at the Gotland yarn sample I spun up some months ago, and I think this is the perfect, beautiful grey and it is not boring. And it is way more homogeneously grey than that middle mini skein. Well. I can’t figure it out. But what I did like was the one on the far right. It’s the most even, and it’s grey, but with the very slightest tinge of creamy yellow, like that yellowish tinge silver has. And I loooove it. I really do. I’ve decided to spin the whole fleece with the tips attached.

In the meantime, I spun MOAR of the fleece I’ve been working on forever. Got two skeins. Washed them up.

Looms are very handy for hanging yarn on. I had been working on finishing the measuring portion of a dishtowel project that I started back in September 2019. You can see the warping board hanging on the other side of the loom.

Had some singles left on a bobbin, so I Andean plied that, and got a smaller skein that I wound into a cake. Then I knit a swatch.

I don’t hate the swatch, but I don’t like it either. I used three different sizes of needle, and I think I could go down another size even. This yarn would definitely resist pilling and it’s stretchy enough for knitting, but I’m not crazy about how it doesn’t fluff up after washing and blocking. It is, after all, a weaving yarn. If I want sweater yarn for knitting, I’m going to have to card the wool, and then spin using the long draw method, which, frankly, scares me. I’m pretty good at spinning a worsted yarn. Pretty darned good. I cannot spin long draw to save my life. It’s awful. And a thing I will have to learn.