The blob that ate Leesy's life

I dropped off the radar for a while again, I know.  I have been busy, but in very weird ways.  I don't even remember if I mentioned here in bloggy land about what happened right after the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival at the beginning of May, but basically I spent that whole Sunday walking around, got up the next morning to take a walk, and as I finished the walk I crouched down to pick up some dyeing lichen I saw lying in my next door neighbors' yard.  At that point I suddenly felt a burning pain in my leg which turned out once I went to the doctor two days later to be:

THE BLOB THAT ATE LEESY'S LIFE

Okay, it was a superficial venous thrombophlebitis.  In English, that means a medically non-significant blood clot and inflamed vein.  It's the kind of thing you get warned about if you're going to be sitting a lot on an airplane, except then they're more worried about the deep vein kind because that's the dangerous kind.  The thing is, I had been very active the weeks and especially the days leading up to it developing.  Plus I have been exhausted since then, and short of breath, and having fluttering feelings in my chest.  So since all my bloodwork came back pretty normal (you WISH you had my cholesterol readings), my MD set me up immediately for some cardiac testing--a Holter monitor and next a stress echocardiogram (which was going to be today but had to be rescheduled until Thursday).  So my leg is still lumpy (that pic above was taken today, a month after the blob first appeared), I have no energy, and generally I feel like I can't do anything.

But since being me I couldn't really do nothing (except of course when it comes to housework) I had to develop a new obsession.  Oh, yes, I'm still spinning and dyeing--

And I'm still baking

Sunday's bagels; we had run out of bread so baking was necessary, right?

But now I'm making CHEESE!  Mozzarella, yogurt cheese, feta, it's been a blast.  Okay, the ricotta was a bust, but I didn't know what I was going to do with that anyhow and it was just an attempt to use the leftover whey from the second batch of mozzarella.  And here is about half the mozzarella, turned into pizza Margherita and white pizza today.  

Yes, I couldn't resist eating some before I snapped the photo

I figure, hey, fresh whole local organic milk in an amount to make 1 lb of fresh mozzarella costs pretty much the same amount of money as 8 oz of kosher store-bought mozzarella (it costs more if you want cholov Yisroel, but we don't), and we eat so much mozzarella that even the cost of the kosher rennet and the citric acid needed are made up the first week.  Now I want to get a cheese press to be able to make pressed, long-cured cheeses!

So I hope to get back to speed once my leg and my general health get back to speed themselves.  My knitting and spinning are just really in slow motion.  But at least I have my bread machine and local stores which sell fresh cow and goat milks and my bottle of rennet in the fridge, so what little energy I have can be channeled to something.  Just not to house keeping, sadly.

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.

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.

Bead it

A few months ago I dabbled briefly in knitting with seed beads.  I really liked that but I just haven't gotten back to the other projects I planned using those techniques.  Beads kept calling my name though so I decided to try something else...

Left bobbin: plied yarn; center bobbin: alpaca with beads; right bobbin: Rambouillet

Beaded yarn!

One strand of cinnamon alpaca, on which I pre-strung beads as I spun it, 50 beads or so every now and then; and one strand of the fawn Rambouillet from the fleece that won't end (actually at this point there are only a few ounces left).  Each was spun at about 13:1 with a short forward draft.  Then I plied them at a slower ratio so I'd have plenty of control, and voila!  I have 877 yards of beaded 2 ply lace weight yarn.

The beading took much less time and effort than I'd always imagined it would, so I would definitely do it again soon.  In fact I have a gorgeous white fine wool fleece and about a pound of grey Cotswold, and I may experiment with this with both of them.

Sheep 1, Sheep 2, Sheep 3, Spin them all

Stephanie Jeffers of TX, a friend of my aunt's, raises Tunis sheep (and last season at least one East Friesian, as part of a 4-H cohort, I know).  She sent me a clipping from three of her flock, to see what I could say about their sales-worthiness and usefulness as spinning fleeces.  Oh, what a trial, to have to play with samples of three sheeps' fleece.

Unwashed wool locks as I received them

So I quickly hand washed each lock in some hot water and hot rinse, let them dry a couple of days (okay, yeah, I forgot about them, it's been a little crazy here), and then spun little samples.

Washed with small spun samples

First up is Prince Charming.  At this point in the winter, with a month or so probably until shearing, his wool was about 2.5" long, fine, and cottony.  It was nicely white, had good crimp and elasticity, opened right up with a little flick-combing, and wanted to spin quite finely on my very lightweight spindle I was using for the sampling.  I think this fleece would want to be combed and then could make an great hosiery-type yarn.

Second was the wonderfully named Hagar.  His fleece was shorter, under 2".  It was incredibly easy to draft and spin; I just very lightly flicked the lock and then found that as I spun from it, layers just gently peeled away to allow me to spin what made a wonderfully even, gently spun 2 ply sample.  This fleece screams to be either flicked and spun with a light hand, or else spun woolen with a long draw.

 

And saving the most special for last, we come to Odette.  Odette is a lamb who has not had her milk fleece shorn.  The birth wool of Tunis lambs is a beautiful red, and so the red is mixed in with the white in her fleece.  I was worried that at this point her wool might be a matted, sun-burnt mess, but not so.  It's about 5" long, and was easily teased out with a hand held comb (I was using a single Valkyrie Extra Fine comb to tease each of these, but if I were handling the whole fleeces I might choose my less-fine Indigo Hound mini-combs for the job).  I spun it with a bit more twist despite the longer length, and got a lovely, even, very elastic two ply sample.  I know the red-brown lamb wool doesn't show well in the photos, but it's there.  Ensuring it doesn't comb out in processing would take a very light hand, however.

So overall--very spinnable fleeces.  No breaks, no matting, no scurf, minimal or no tip damage.  The only problem I will note is that there was a LOT of VM of the type I abhor in my fleeces, the little bits of grass cuttings and chaff, which is very hard to comb out.  These sheep were not coated and they live in Texas after all.  However, on opening up and spinning the fleeces, there did seem to be far less than there looked to be when I first glanced at the samples as I began to wash them, so hand washing and processing seems as though it would be sufficient.  The last quality control issue which we can't speak to now, of course, is shearing.  This flock in the past has not been managed as a spinning wool flock, and so shearing has only been focussed on care of the sheep, with the expectation that the wool would be discarded.  Assuming that the shearer finds the sheep can be handled suitably on shearing so that the fleeces can be sheared with minimal second cutting and similar damage, these should be great fleeces for the hand spinning market.

Spinning in Public, Wheaton edition

So yesterday I spent several hours in The Yarn Spot's booth at the annual Taste of Wheaton event. Okay, I don't live in Wheaton, I live a couple of neighborhoods away in Aspen Hill (sadly more infamous for sniper shootings than livelihood or commerce), but the shop is in Wheaton. We had a great turnout and a lot of people were interested in the shop. Since I was spinning, I did get a good bit of attention, but there were two "stand out" moments.

Let me start by mentioning that in the US, commercially spun yarn has been widely available since before the Civil War. Remember reading Laura Ingalls Wilder's books? Ever think about how she mentions knitting and sewing several times, but never spinning? Even they on the edges of the frontier at times were buying ready-to-knit yarns. Certainly there were pioneers who travelled with spinning equipment, but in much of the US as commerce progressed there wasn't a big need for home spinning, and people took the opportunity to spend their time on other, more pressing, needs when they could buy yarn as a commodity and didn't need to spend the hours spinning it themselves. However, in much of the world, even today and certainly throughout the twentieth century, spinning in the home (or while engaged in daily activities) isn't and hasn't been uncommon.

With that explained, you won't be surprised to hear that both my special spinning encounters yesterday were with people who emigrated to the US from elsewhere.

The first was with two women who came to see what I was doing. One spoke English, her friend only Spanish. She happily but suspiciously asked just what fiber I was spinning and I knew I wasn't really surprising her when I answered that it was not sheep's wool but alpaca. Still, her companion was surprised; they were Peruvian, and couldn't believe that in the US we appreciated the wonders of alpaca. I told them the fiber I was spinning came from a local farm (we have several alpaca farms between Damascus and Thurmont, MD, in the foothills of our local low mountains; alpacas seem to do quite well there). They made sure I knew that alpacas really were "theirs" and came from Peru, talked about the spindles we had, and generally left delighted that people knew about real life and real animals and their importance even here.

The second was a woman who came over to our booth as she ran an errand from her own. She stopped to gaze at the various spindles on the table, and then began to tell us of her own childhood in Italy. Her grandmother, she said, spun all the time on a drop spindle; she demonstrated to us with her hands and an imaginary spindle her grandmother's thigh-flick, and talked of how fast the spindle would spin. She herself had tried to learn as a child, but all she remembered was her grandmother yelling at her that she was no good at it! Several times she showed us her grandmother's motions. I know that flicking a spindle in that way can give an extremely fast spin, and I'd love to have been able to see her grandmother in action (though not the part about her scolding!). I hope this woman does come in to the shop (the other two also), maybe to finally learn to spin now.

Double, double, coils and trouble

I spun my first core spun supercoil yarn:

not perfect, but certainly fine. It's Romney wool, dyed in broom sedge last year when I was at John C. Campbell Folk School. It was spun into lightly spun singles Z twist; then wrapped over a core of laceweight commercial yarn I had left over from some knitting, with the core slightly retarded relative to the wrapping yarn and with the wrapping yarn held at angles varying from about 70 to 100 degrees relative to the core.

Close up:

Oh, and yes, Kayla is reading Macbeth in school; Tirtze's on Othello.

This coming week

I won't be around much; I tentatively still have jury duty Tuesday, then have Sheep and Wool classes scheduled all of Wednesday and Thursday! Whoo, hoo!

So what's going on? The little kids are still nuts. However, Gilad is the one giving us fits. He cut his own hair at school this week (not too noticeably, fortunately), but more of a problem is that the teacher called a second time to report that he has been getting so physical with the other kids he's hurting others and is becoming the real class troublemaker. How did my little boy get to this point? They've recommended an OT eval for one thing, which I'm trying to set up, but irritatingly it looks like because he's in the Spring before he's eligible to enter kindergarden, the public schools in our county don't want to deal with him. He's too old to enter "Child Find" and too young for kindergarden so he's in that black hole even for evaluation, and definitely for all services other than speech, which is the only itinerant service they'll provide for non-public school students here. Still, I've started the paperwork process and trail.

Why haven't I been posting much spinning and knitting? Because I was spinning the killer yarn of lacy overabundance. Nine ounces wound up spinning up to 2000 yards of 2 ply lace yarn! Modeled here by Kayla so you can get an idea of just how much of this stuff there is:

I also finished an April hat for the Larkin project for homeless teens

But my real excitement has been my research on German torah wimpeln from baby bris swaddling clothes. I did my talk and now I'm hoping to submit an article for publication! Now I just have to get my act together and get my submission in.

where am I?

Okay, the super good news is that Adele has been okay. I didn't realize I hadn't posted since the middle of her crisis. For now we're working with the "she's weird and had a strange series of viruses and somehow got the one-in-a-million case of toddler viral tenosynovitis" theory until proven otherwise.

I was supposed to head out to Israel on last Wednesday. Here it is Sunday and I'm still here thanks to the mid-Atlantic blizzards. Hopefully we'll be able to fly out today! So I'll leave you with an extensive gallery of all the knitting I've been doing and not posting, including the projects that were supposed to be for my trip!

crocheted (!) scarf for Tirtze

kappa socks for my HP OWL project set

600 yards of laceweight CVM yarn

my flower garden vest

a vest for The Yarn Spot in Glisten yarn

this and the following hat are my own designs, both hats destined for the Larkin Center for Homeless Teens' annual hat drive

This is a my "where's the sheep" hat; the yarns are yak, alpaca and mohair, and the only wool is some white CVM lamb plied with the mohair.

So I guess it was getting too dull around here

I was just knitting along, and spinning up 7 ounces of 3 ply Finnish Landrace sock yarn, knitting hats, vests, and shawls, and apparently getting too complacent.

So yesterday Adele woke up and was crying all morning. We took her to school and after just a little bit they realized she really couldn't walk. The nurse took a look and saw she had swelling under her right knee and that it was somewhat warm to the touch. Pediatricians hope it's Lyme disease (yes, only my kids would be dx'd with Lyme in late January), and have ruled out injury, so now we wait until tomorrow when they have more of the bloodwork results back. Adele was WONDERFUL at all the appointments yesterday.

A Thanksgiving Tale: Feivel Goes South

Here's the whole story. Feivel wanted to go out late on Thanksgiving morning. His Oma told him he could walk to the Brookville Market, 1/2 mile right down the road (no turns, no major roads to cross, etc) to buy her some paper napkins she needed, and that he could buy himself a candy bar with the change. He headed out and came back 5 minutes later saying he couldn't find the store. We told him he hadn't gone far enough; he knows right where the store is; we've walked there with him in the past and he's been there plenty of times. So he headed back out.

An hour and a half later, he hadn't returned. I walked up to the shops, checking the side streets and so on. The clerk had seen him come and buy the napkins and 3 candies by about 11:30, just when he should have arrived. No one at any of the other shops had seen him. No one coming from the other direction had seen him.

We drove the rest of the way down the road to Chevy Chase Circle. We went around the circle, down 1/2 mile of CT Ave in DC, and back up CT Ave in MD. No Feivel. At that point we called the police.

They had 10 units, and a regular K9 unit out searching and picked up his pillowcases for the K9 bloodhound unit search when he finally called 5 hours after setting out. He had indeed gotten lost, had gone the wrong way when he came out of the store, gone all the way to the other end of the road by the Circle, turned away from CT Ave (where he would have found shops and shoppers galore, and which was visible from where he came out at the end of the road) and instead headed down Western Ave into the residential area of Chevy Chase, DC. He just kept walking until finally he gave up and asked a nice lady out for a walk for help because he was lost. She told him no problem, people got lost all the time in their neighborhood, but she had no idea he was the object of such a big police search and was as lost as he was! He asked her to help him find his grandparents' phone number and knew their full names, so she was able to call 411 and get the number quickly; he was so good he even told her he wasn't allowed to enter a stranger's house so he stayed outside and she brought the cordless phone out. He called us, the police went right there to stay with him until we arrived, and we flew right out to get him.

So that was that. He was home just in time for Thanksgiving dinner (he needed to rest and relax for a while before he was ready to eat; he was scared, tired, and cold), and we had a Feivel to be extra thankful for.

And just for a more typical update, here's Addie in her Thanksgiving dress:

A hat I just finished knitting to mail off for a "Hats for Homeless Teens" drive:

And some yarn I finally spun this month after buying and dyeing the fleece last winter when I was in North Carolina at the John C. Campbell Folk School:

The second hedgehog hat

Done. Now to get the pattern properly written and the charts too.

Plus I've started spinning some comeback type fleece dyed in cochineal and have a sock pattern packed in my knitting bag.

Sweater progress

The sheep are knit with Romeldale and llama for the border, Corrie and Icelandic wools for the main motif area. The bunny border is knit in mohair blend and camel, the background in mid-grey CVM and the bunnies alternating white CVM and angora/silk/merino (because I only had 30 yards of that which translated to 5.5 rows). I made a chart reading error but it only really shows right at the seam so I’ve been able to hide it I think. On the first row of the camel motifs I had to rip back one row for the first time; I gave a camel 5 legs (oops). All fixed now. The camel border is knit in 2 shades of CVM, and the camel has the background in white camel (I have just enough I think) and camel camel (I mean camel colored camel down yarn).