Fleece Washing Day

It's raining out, I've hurt my leg and can't drive (beyond the critical MD visits etc) or spin, I've combed all of the fleece I had been spinning when I left off at the end of last week before hurting myself, so the best thing to do is start washing the fleeces I bought at MDSW this weekend.

Starting off with a small (3.5) very well-skirted, fairly short but gorgeous white Border Leicester fleece.  Here is the sales slip with all the details (okay, you really don't care but for me to include this is a major step towards actually keeping track of what I have from whom! and in this case it actually matters, according to this the shepherd is an unlisted MSBA member, so if I were to make something from this and choose to enter it at next year's MDSW skein & garment competition, it counts as Maryland wool, which has special awards and categories, but ONLY if I have kept a record for myself that it is indeed Maryland wool).

And here is step one (after some basic picking-over and double-checking):  soaking to get out all the suint (sheep sweat) and mud:

Yes, it's a bunch of wool in tepid water in a utility sink.  But to some of us it's magic.

Okay, a few hours later I came back and drained the filthy water out.  Then I refilled the tub (this fleece was very well behaved, I was able to just shove it to the far side from the tap) with water as hot as I can run it.  If I were washing a fine wool fleece, more prone to felting and more full of lanolin, I wouldn't do this and I would also add even hotter water from my coffee urn to bring the temp up higher than the 120F my water heater is set at.  I add Unicorn Power Scour (or if I'm out of that, blue original Dawn dish soap).

Filling the sink with the hot water

Added the scouring agent

Can you see how red my hand is from the hot water?  Smarter fleece scourers use rubber gloves...

If you find stained sections (I don't know if you can see the green in these, probably left over from breeding marking) or areas that are still just filthy or discolored or damaged, just pick them out and discard them.

Close up

After a few minutes, it's time to move the fleece aside and drain it well again.  Don't let it sit in the water cooling, the lanolin will just re-deposit on the wool.  Refill the tub immediately again with hot water for a rinse; I add 1/4 C vinegar as I find it really improves the hand and removes any residual stickiness or gumminess.  I didn't bother taking another photo at that point because it would just be again a sink full of fleece in water, though.  

I let this sit and cool completely for a few hours, to room temperature.  

Next, I drained it all out and then put it in the washer on "spin" only.  And now it's drying:

A little VM still there but essentially clean!

The Sheepiest Day(s) of the Year

This was the first full weekend in May which means it was MARYLAND SHEEP AND WOOL FESTIVAL, sponsored as always by the Maryland Sheep Breeders' Association.

This year brought the most glorious possible weather; sunny and pleasantly cool.

So I started the day with a 5:30 AM alarm.  Got up, ran to Krispy Kreme for mini donuts, came home for breakfast, headed out the door with the donuts and two cups of coffee plus two friends for the drive up to the Howard County Fairgrounds in West Friendship, right up Rte 97 from our house.  The coffee and donuts weren't from me, they Tom Coughlin.  Susan and Tom own the wonderful Coughlin's Homespun Yarns company and more than that they were doing me a huge favor; Susan had agreed to meet up on my behalf with some women who were driving an antique spinning wheel I had bought from upstate New York to the festival, but who weren't arriving until too late Friday for me to comfortably meet them.  Not only that, but then despite the chaos and business of MDSW vending, Susan and Tom held the wheel in their van until we arrived at 7:45.

It followed me home.  It's not livestock, so I am keeping it.

If you're wondering why I brought 2 cups of coffee and a box of donuts for Tom and not Susan, it's only because Susan doesn't drink coffee or eat donuts :)

So we picked up my wheel (thankfully I did have two friends with me already), took it back to the car (even more thankfully, we got an incredible parking space at the beginning of the first row, facing out!), headed back in finding another friend (Hi, Mary!) on the way in, and started looking and shopping.

And here's how I made out shopping wise.  First, Cotswold roving, yak from Wild Fibers, Fiber Optic purples Shetland top, Valkyrie 3 pitch Super Fine combs from Carolina Homespun, Poseidon sock kit from the Tsarina of Tsocks, MDSW cap, wool blend for spinning, Jacob fleece from Shiloh Manor, Border Leicester fleece, white alpaca, and two jars of honey from The Bee People (cranberry and hot pepper flower)!

And then (from top left, clockwise) a Spanish Peacock diz/wpi tool; some drive bands for double drive; some peppermint soap, and the best magnet ever:

 

And then there was the skein and garment show.  My alpaca/wool vest took a blue ribbon and a special award for best alpaca garment

My Forest Path stole won a second place red ribbon and a special award for best hand spun article

and two skeins won third place awards.  Two of my skeins which did NOT win awards received 95 and 92 points respectively, but I guess they were in incredibly hot categories to not win a ribbon but have such high scores.  I'm fine with that!

Overall, a great time and a mild sunburn was had by all I think.  I'm already counting the months to next year.

Give him an "A" for appalling

The principal of local Albert Einstein High School posted the following on the school website and apparently distributed the notice to families.  This is one of the most appalling, offensive, unprofessional, regressed, and generally inappropriate statements I have ever heard in modern public education.  He has removed it from the website after complaints, but has issued no apology and has stated to advocates that he fails to see what is wrong with what he wrote.  Screen shot is here as apparently the school did take it down.

We will have a new special needs program at Einstein next year called Extensions. The technical description of the Program is, “ … these students have moderate, severe, or profound intellectual disabilities, or multiple disabilities including intellectual disabilities and/or autism. These students have a prolonged history of aggressive, self-injurious, destructive, or disruptive behaviors that have not responded to functional and systematic behavioral interventions … .” 

Our current School Community Based Program is very similar except for the, “ aggressive, self-injurious … ” component. The Extensions Program is self-contained with the exception of their physical education class which is restricted to Extensions students only.  

I am aware that some are concerned about the aggressive nature of some of the kids in the Program. Extension students will come by special transportation, have two of their own classrooms and restrooms, eat lunch in their rooms and essentially be self-contained other than their phys. ed. class. 

Although it is sad that these students do not have the same capacity and abilities and be able to totally participate in Einstein life,  as the remainder of our student body, we will welcome them and their parents and guardians with open arms and gladly. There is no cause for alarm that any of the students not in the Program are in danger. This Program exists in other schools and is growing which is why we have been awarded and welcome its placement at Einstein. 

If you have any questions or concerns about the Program please contact me or Charmaine Roberts who is in charge of our special education program.  

Thanks,

Mr. Fernandez 

Plays well with others

That's what I'm calling the finished yarn from my last post's adventures:

Three-ply, 200 yards, 2.55 oz, 17 wpi, 1255 ypp.  It's a lightweight but bulked up DK weight yarn.  I'm thinking it would be perfect for knitting up Knitty's Knotty but Nice hat or something like that.  It's very soft, very lofty, and was a breeze to ply up.

I guess the rest of this Romeldale will need to be blended, maybe with more of this Rambouillet cross (I still have HOW MANY POUNDS of the Rambouillet x Targee x Polypay?).  It turns it from a nightmare of a fiber into a sweet night's dream.

In which two wooly wrongs make a spinning right

It all started with a wonderful chocolate brown Romeldale fleece.  Well, when I say "wonderful," I mean it's incredibly crimped, phenomenally soft, and amazingly thick.  Thicker in fact than any Merino or Rambouillet I've ever handled.  So I washed it (couldn't get all the lanolin out no matter what I tried, but I got most of it).  Then I tried combing it and carding it.  Then I threw up my hands and gave up in disgust because the incredible crimp and fine fiber meant it was impossible to work with.

Fast forward to today, when I told myself "Self, you must clear out more of the fiber stash.  Get spinning."  At the top of the pile was the luscious chocolate Romeldale.  "Surely," said I to myself, "now that I'm so much more experienced a spinner and comber and so on, I'll have no problem!"

Yep, that's an attempt at combing it.  Pass after pass just made my elbows hurt and made the fiber start to noil (knot up on itself).  Worse yet, when I tried spinning the one precious ounce I'd managed to comb, I was miserable with the results.  It was uneven and knotty and wouldn't hold together.  When I tried to draft it at the thickness I wanted I just couldn't get it to cooperate.

So I dug out my Rambouillet X Targhee X Polypay fleece (I have 7 lbs of it, I might was well, right).  That one doesn't have to potential to give me so many fits, but it's very full of VM, and very, very disorganized.  One lock of each shown below in each photo...

Rambo X on the right uncombed; Romeldale on the left

The Romeldale in the center has been combed

Believe it or not, when combed out fully, the two fleeces have the same lock length.  That's right.  That tiny inch of Romeldale on the right combs out at rest to what you see in the center, but fully combed under tension it's as long as the Rambouillet cross is.

And this is what I got when I combed them together:

It spins as easy or easier than anything else I've ever worked with, hand prepped or mill provided.  It's gorgeous and even and does exactly what I tell it to do.

The only down side is that Adele tells me it looks like my grey hair.

Horrors

I've been posting a few pictures over on Facebook which have a few people asking me questions.  In order to fully answer everyone at length, a post here seemed in order so that I can construct a more complete and referenced response.

I've posted three pictures in particular; one each of women (about to be hanged); men (starved and enslaved); and children (similarly treated); all originally provided on Facebook by an Israeli Holocaust documentation organization.

These just are visually striking reminders of the recent documentation which came out to the full public media over a month ago.  The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum found that there was simply no way most German citizenry did not know the general extent of enslavement and genocide being carried out in the name of their political regime.  Apologism and psychology must be pushed aside and the realization must be made that indeed, the evil that occurred under the Nazis was widely known, fully understood, and accepted by much of society.

If you want to understand this more, I would urge you to get copies of two modern books, widely available in US public libraries and certainly through Amazon and other sellers (I'm even going to provide you the Amazon links, and I no, I don't get the little cut Amazon provides to registered partners).  Both are written by women who were German children of the time, whose parents were Nazi officers, but both give a very different perspective of what that means, and you can't really understand how important it is to fully appreciate this without reading both for reasons which will come clear below.

First, I would have you read Helga Schneider's Let Me Go.  To some this will be the easier to read without regret.  Schneider's mother was a Nazi concentration camp guard who abandoned her children to her own parents' care in order to serve the regime (the mother's parents incidentally were virulent anti-Nazis who suffered deprivation and starvation throughout the war along with the children, for their refusal to join the party or take part in its activities).  As an adult, Helga herself set out to try to understand her mother, with the hopes that she would learn her mother had somehow gotten caught up in psychological brain washing, or else perhaps had simply been fearing that if she did not join the strong she would be seen as one of the weak, to be destroyed herself.  What Helga found was instead horrifying to her; her mother knew from the first what job she had set out to do and reveled in it, in fact wanted nothing more than the opportunity to enact evil and receive glory for doing so.  While her daughter hoped to find the opposite, she resolutely documents this significantly large segment of German behavior--that which deliberately and evilly brought war and genocide to their neighbors for no other reason than that they could do so.  No apology is possible, no psychological explanation is warranted.  A large number of Germans were truly evil and knew exactly what was happening, why it was, and supported it.

The second book is actually harder to read, not because it is poorly written (it's not) but because of the incredible social and political blindness it records throughout.  It is On Hitler's Mountain: Overcoming the Legacy of a Nazi Childhood by Irmgard A. Hunt.  Hunt and her sister and mother were inhabitants of Berchtesgaden, a Nazi headquarters and retreat.  She portrays it as more or less a paradise, where they lived in beauty and suffered little of the deprivation of others during the war.  She is completely unaware of the suffering, the battles, the genocide, and shows little regret for any of them in her adult recollections.  Indeed the only time she shows any humanity or immediate feelings is the incident at the end of the memoir, during the trials of Nazi officers for their war crimes, when a school mate of hers shows up white faced after his own father's execution.  Even in adulthood, fully cognizant of the enormity of her parents' and their compatriots' actions, she can only relate directly to the others she knew who were immediately impacted and shows no awareness or regret for any of the Nazi horrors.

You see now why I am profiling these very "in your face" photographs.  No matter how apologistic other writers may be, no matter how many would have us believe that the genocide atrocities of the Nazis was overall due to economic factors and psychological brainwashing, the truth is that the Nazi evils were simply that--evils.  Germans and others walked daily past the starved, the enslaved, the being-murdered.  They saw hangings, shootings, gassings, slavery, people treated like cattle.  Some of them did indeed hate it, some resisted it.  But most did not.  And many fully participated and supported it.  No lies to the contrary should make us apologize or try to understand or accept that.

Special Bonus Passover Apple Cake Recipe

The good news is this cake is so good the kids fight over it.  The bad news is I'm not joking, my kids actually fight over it.  Try it and see what happens at your house.

Equipment:

1 9x9 or 8x8 square pan or 1 9" or 10" round cake pan (I use a flexible silicone pan and it's perfect; if you're using a metal pan I would recommend lining it with parchment or foil)

hand or stand mixer

spatula

mixing bowl

measuring spoons and cups

Ingredients:

Baking spray or vegetable oil

2 T confectioners sugar (optional, for coating pan)

2 apples

1 tsp cinnamon

2 T sugar

4 eggs

3/4 C sugar

1 tsp lemon juice

1/4 C potato starch

1/2 C matzo meal or matzo cake meal

Preheat oven to 350F.  Spray or pour the oil in the baking pan.  Sprinkle in the confectioners sugar if using and shake it around the pan to coat it (it won't spread as well as flour or year-round confectioners sugar would, but it'll be good enough).

Slice the apples thinly and lay the slices in the pan.  Sprinkle them with the cinnamon and 2 T sugar.

Beat the eggs for 5-10 minutes, until they've gotten light in color and at least doubled in volume.  Then add in the other ingredients and mix for about 1 minute.  Pour the batter into the pan over the apples

Bake for 40-45 minutes until lightly brown and well-set.  Cool in the pan on a rack.  When it's cool, you can invert it for an upside down cake or just serve it right out of the pan.

I wanted to add a photo, but the kids seriously ate the whole first cake and fought over the last slice.  I have the second cake in the oven, and I'll add a photo when I can!