Trampled by Geese is a reminder to myself to look at the positive side of life and to endeavour to only write about things that inspire me rather than focus on what is negative in the world. Kirkegaard once wrote, “Being trampled by geese is a slow way of dying, but being eaten to death by envy and greed is even slower and more painful”.
Wow, I may have just jumped the shark here, but I did it. I made a cloak, entirely by hand, using traditional methods, from sheep to finished clothing!
Basically, I gave in to peer pressure and put my life on hold to make this cloak. It turned out amazing, but I still have a lot of work to do to finish it up. Something to keep me busy this winter.
I want to talk about the pattern because the video was long and I edited that bit out. Also I don't really feel qualified to assess a sewing pattern as a complete N00b!
Don't ask me why... Okay, you can ask me why but I'll probably mumble "I don-no" and change the subject to "isn't that pretty yarn?"
For some reason, I am filled with the belief that my life will be infinitely better if I own a cloak.
(or possibly cape, I haven't figured this part out yet - I figure cloaks are longer but this might just be something I made up in my head)
So I'm going to drop all my other projects and make a cloak. By "make" I mean I'm going to go outside and ask my sheep for some wool then spin, weave, and sew a cloak.
But to make things even more challenging, I'm going to do it in a month. This month. The month of September, in this year, 2022.
Um... this sleep thing they keep talking about. That's optional, right?
I have no idea if I can do this. It's a lot more than I've ever attempted before. On top of that, I'm still on the mend from my surgery. This might not go well.
Full disclosure, I have some of the yarn spun already. Probably not enough to make much difference.
So it's going to be a challenge. Especially because I hope to also make some videos about this journey which makes everything take twice as long.
Our stinging nettles take forever to die off in the winter. It isn't until the hard freeze we get for a week to ten days after Christmas that they really start to die back, and even then there are hangers on.
But come Feb, all but the most shelter nettle plants are standing corpses (with the little baby nettles already peaking up in the leaf litter). A few days break from the rain and we can finally explore the root retting method for harvesting fibre.
On my bookshelf, you will find,Yarn from Wild Nettles, by Birte Ford. It's a great book with lots of ideas for, you guessed it - transforming stinging nettles into yarn. It is from here I got the idea.
Finally, I caught the nettles at the perfect moment in our weather cycle - so it's time to see if it works.
It's easy to do. We forget that the spinners of years gone by didn't spin yarn for fun, or to save money or for sentimental reasons. They did so because, without yarn, they were bloody cold!
Yarn is survival.
All the incarnations. Be it string, twine, rope, thread, yarn... all was made by hand and without it humanity couldn't thrive in the extreme environments that we do today. Yarn binds us together as a species.
What amazes me most of all is how universal yarn production is. Every culture that makes yarn has three steps (draft, twist, stash). Sometimes these are done by different people (Cowichan Nations and Ancient Egypt), but always the same three steps. Draft, twist, stash.
And almost universal is having something to manage your fibre source. Often this is a distaff.
If it was as clumsy as it feels to my modern hands, people would have given it up long ago. And yet, even well into the 20th Century, handspinners who are connected to their cultural roots and a time when spinning yarn was a survival trait, still used distaves (plural of distaff).
Last year, I set out to perfect my distaff spinning skills. I got pretty good at it, but I also learned that one year is not long enough to master this skill. There is so much more to learn.
But... I did learn lots and here are a few methods I found work well for me for dressing a distaff with wool.
There are as many ways to dress a distaff as there are spinners who use them, so try lots of things and find out what works well for you. There is no wrong way so long as it gives you the results you seek.
I was looking for a video on how medieval people used to make distaffs (yes, I get bored sometimes), and stumbled on this video. Thought you might enjoy it.
It's the next best thing to travelling in the TARDIS. I just got home from spending a week in the 14th Century. For the week we slept, we worked, we ate, we lived at Fort Rodd Hill park; sleeping in cotton pavilions, working on medieval artisan crafts and cooking, and we ate foods from the history books, prepared by our own hands, cooked over fire.
Me winding a warp for weaving. Beside me you can see signs of flax fibre being prepared for spinning.
My favourite part of the week, other than the days when I got to play work diligently in the kitchen, was interacting with the public. I learned a lot about life in the Middle Ages that just isn't in the history books, but telling people about what I was doing and learning - that was awesome.
I have a lot of ideas of what to do for next year, which include spinning and spending more time in the kitchen.
The saddest thing for me was that we only spend one week a year travelling through history. A week spent eating only old world foods, living in an environment with good airflow (albeit a lot of large biting spiders), and with like minded people, was very much my cuppa tea (or Herbal Infusion as tea hasn't made it to England by the 14th Century). I wish I could do this all year, a different century for every season... but alas, the sheep need feeding, the chickens need cleaning, and all the other barnyard animals at home miss me too much.
The year is 1371 and we are travellers on our way to Canterbury. Why are we going there? Well, that's what people did in England in 1371.
One of the local parks has this event every year where people set up some tents and live life medievally. All the cooking will be by fire, our days will be filled with medieval tasks with weaving and spinning and many other beautiful things.
(some photos from past years - a few from my own camera and a few from other's in the group)
This is really exciting for me, as not only will I be learning to cook over an open flame, but also learning (and teaching) many exciting things. The park is open to the public during the day, but we will be there twenty four hours (except maybe to go home for a shower from time to time). I'll be mostly in the kitchen or textile pavillion.
Although, I admit, the people I'm spending the week with are a bit intimidating - because they have done this many years before and know so much! This will be my first time. Even if I had an extra year to get ready, don't imagine I would feel that I know enough. But if I look at this as an opportunity to learn, hopefully everything will go well.
It also means that for most of the month of August, I won't be near my computer. This week, I'm getting ready to time travel. Next week, the computer hasn't been invented yet, and the rest of the month, I have for catching up on the many things that need doing on the farm.
I need a new belt, so I'm attempting to get my head around tablet weaving. So far the result is lovely but keeping the warp threads organized is hell. Eventually I'll figure something out, I'm sure.
