For years, I avoided weaving with linen, and when I finally tried it, yep. It's hard. So hard that I sent my loom to a friend's house to finish off the weaving, and even she had trouble.
I've gotten to know linen a bit since then, and here is basically the video I wish I had watched when I was a new weaver. How to make weaving with linen easy.
Distaffs (or distaves) are used for all sorts of different fibres. It's basically a third hand that holds the fibre while our other hands are busy spinning it into yarn.
Distaff Day is on the 7th of January and is the most important holiday in the spinner's calendar. Well, I say holiday, but it's actually the back-to-work day but we do it with great fun.
This year, I dressed distaves in flax fibre for spinning linen yarn.
Here's a free PDF guide on dressing a distaff with linen fibre.
Last year I did the same with wool
Now, how do I up my game for next year? Anything about distaves you wanted to know?
What unexpected yarn has fallen into your life? Do you have a go-to project you love to make with found yarn or do you wait to see what the yarn says it wants to be?
About a year ago, I stumbled on some free yarn, leftovers from the now closed local mill. Talking to people who used to work there, this was part of calibrating the spinning machine, so it contains a lot of different fibres from a variety of farms. Most of them are less than a day's journey away.
So I made a thing. And I made a video about the thing. And the yarn. And deep thoughts about the yarn, fibreshed, and my personal textile history.
Winter has been a bit meh this year. A bit of a health setback before the Holidays and the only game we get to play on the farm is catch-up.
I've also been working away on several projects and finishing almost none of them.
But finally, I got one done! Just in time for (what I hope is) the last snowfall of the year.
If you like the video, please pop over to youtube and leave a like or even a comment as it helps me out tremendously.
And here is the full playlist that takes us from sheep to finished cloak!
I enjoyed this project. It's the first time I've made something from sheep to clothing that feels like a quality garment. What's more, it's a sheep from my farm! One that I feed every day and who loves cuddles.
In a lot of ways I've gained confidence. I understand better how the yarn behaves in the woven cloth and that I can actually make something from scratch. I also understand why a more historically accurate cloth would involve a lot more people: a shepherd, weaver, spinner, seamstress, etc. It seems almost that I lose as much as I gain doing each step myself.
One of the things I worry about is this sets the bar too high. Both for me and for viewers.
There's no need to do every step ourselves. I did it because I was curious if I could and I'm a cheap little chicken who can't always afford to buy the cloth I want to work with. Even in this project, I combined modern cloth with traditional methods. Add growing, spinning, and weaving the lining to the mix and I would need another year or three to get it done. But even then, I don't think it would have been as good for the cloak as the lining I choose.
It's about learning from history instead of trying to reproduce it. What can I learn from the past and how can I incorporate it in my life today. There's no shame in it. There's no shame if a future project has bought yarn or I go to the shop and buy fabric. And yet, it's a nagging worry that I now need to progress to better and better things, especially on my youtube journey. That's not the path I want to take. I want to make projects that fill me with joy, and sometimes that means buying yarn. Sometimes it means spinning it.
Sometimes there won't be any yarn involved at all.
Most of all, I'm happy with the improvement in my video-making skills. I'm getting better at what to film and what to leave out. My voiceover confidence is improving. I'm still seeking a balance between showing enough for the technically curious and keeping the story moving, but on the whole, I've moved up a notch and am now about 11% of the filmmaker I want to become.
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!
For those of you new to the adventure, you can catch the full playlist here.
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!
I get obsessed when learning a new craft. I take great pleasure in learning everything and to find out what the limits of the craft are, what my limits doing that craft are, and what happens when I push past those limits.
Last month, I experimented with pushing past those limits - twice.
First, I finally took the dive into making a fully (ish) homegrown garment from sheep to wearable clothing. To keep me focused, I gave myself a timeframe - one month - to get it done.
I choose the wrong month because September is pretty much the busiest time on the farm and the only month of the year the weather is friendly, so I'm regretting this.
But the yarn community is lovely and supportive. Sure there are opinions, but so long as we remember when someone says "the best way" or "the right way" what they really mean is "this worked well for me", it's much easier to deal with absolutes.
The second limit was to see if I could make videos about this adventure on a time budget. (time budget? deadline).
I did better than I expected.
And worse.
The thing I'm learning about making videos is that it is a craft - like knitting, spinning, weaving...
I talked about how the craft of weaving has its own personality (ISTP on the Myers-Briggs scale). I suspect we could do that for any craft. Video editing and youtube creation is no exception. Actually, I think it might be entirely off the scale.
But first, proof that I did finish the cloak in time - even if I'm still struggling to finish the video.
Woot! I made cloth!
I'm a fairly good weaver but I do have my comfort zone and this wasn't in it.
Actually, there is a pretty good reason. I wanted to understand how circle cloaks work so I made some tiny mockups. And since the only thing I have that resembles a doll are these chickens...
So what did I learn?
Well, it has begun.
I'm actually doing this. I'm going to attempt to make a cloak, from raw wool, in one month. That's spinning, weaving, and sewing.
And on top of that, I'm making videos about each step - which more than doubles the time everything takes.
This might not be the smartest decision I ever made, but it's going to be a fun adventure.
So, without more preamble (because my spellcheck won't let me put 'preramble' as in the rambling on of words before the thing), I bring you SPINNING!
“The theory was that while in a Fallow state you were gathering and conserving strength, nourishing yourself through meditation, sending invisible rootlets out into the universe.”
― Margaret Atwood, MaddAddam
They say lavender is a calming herb, and I will concede it smells nice.
What I find even more healing is hanging out in the garden doing small, repetitive tasks.
Let's combine the two.
The lore around these magic wands is that the smell of the lavender hides the smell of wool clothing when we put them in storage for the summer. I think that's a lovely idea. Even if it doesn't work, stashing a few of these with my handknits and handwovens until next winter makes me happy.
And if I'm going to start having more clothes, I will either need to get more room to stash them, or put the off-season clothes into storage. The latter seems like less bother.
It began as a compost pile and a birthday present.
When I asked what he wanted for his Birthday, he said something like, you know that yarn you have stashed away as a treasure? You know how you promised me a rug? That's what I want.
The yarn has a story. It's spun at the (former) local fibre mill from a mixture of fibre from the farm. Some of the animals like the rich deep black alpaca, are no longer with us. This is sad, but also happy because the rug helps us remember the good times we had.
But it's not just any old fibre, this fibre was destined for the compost heap, to get smothered with squash plants as it slowly transforms into soil. The fibre was too fragile, too dirty, too... whatever to spin into a sensible yarn. But the mill had this machine that could use inferior fibre to twist around a core and make it soft and strong and valuable.
The results are gorgeous!
It used to be that once a year I would take an internet vacation. A month without internet, usually in February (because it's a short month). I would try to get my work holiday to match and I would worry away at projects that need finishing or something I want to get started and done.
The last time I did that, I wrote a book.
It's been a few years since I took my internet vacation and it's a bit like cookies on the browser, too much internet and I start to slow down and life clogs up. It's hard to get away and spend time doing real-world things.
This year I can't do a proper internet detox, so I'm doing a longer one. Max 1 hour per day on the internet (but more time for video editing). Trying very hard to get the farm ready for spring, grow extra food in the garden, and film more projects for youtube.
Sheep are very helpful... or enthusiastic.
It means the same thing when you are a sheep.
But this internet vacation means I haven't had much time for blogging lately. It also makes me realize how much I enjoy blogging again. So I'll be back.
Just as soon as I can get a few more things done around the farm.
Laying the flax out to dew ret - for more on that, here's a video:
Winters here are dark. Far darker than you think for our latitude, but with the clouds, rain, and oppressive conifers hemming us in on all sides, we can go weeks needing the lights on in the house at noon.
It's also very hard on the animals. We have lights in the hen house our they forget to wake up and eat. It's always a battle to keep everyone healthy - critters and humans alike.
Basically, winters on the farm are dark. But what makes them bearable is spring and all the new life it brings.
A while back, I put an advert in the local UsedAnywhere seeking bummers. A bummer is a lamb whose mum is unable to feed it, either because the lamb is an orphan or they have too many siblings competing for limited milk supply or other reasons.
Well, I got a reply so I'm off on an adventure to meet some lambs.
It's a day trip and a ferry trip from home. But it's a lot of fun to see what's up in the Cowichan Valley. Enjoy.
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.
Here's what happened:
I think I know why it didn't work.
Confession time: Dyeing scares me.
(dyeing - as in making things colourful)
There is so much science about it - and as much as I love geeking out and learning the details, I also get lost in them.
What if I do it wrong? What if it's ugly? What if...
A few months ago, I was putting my garden to bed for the winter and I was thinking about this list of what if's, probably because I was digging up some madder roots for a new garden because I love the colours madder makes and you can never have too much.
I put aside about a third of the madder root for drying and dyeing at some later date. Because one day I'll know enough to be able to use it. I've never seen instructions for dyeing with fresh root before. Maybe it's not possible. Someone would have told me if it was.
Then I started to get angry at myself. Why don't I just do it? It's only yarn. I've got nearly 5 kilometres of handspun yarn ready for just this sort of harvest. It's not like I need a specific colour, all I want are pretty reds. What keeps stopping me from dyeing?
The answer, I'm sad to say, is me.
So I designed an experiment based on what I know about madder. Scared that I might destroy all that handspun yarn, but excited too that I could finally do this thing.
It's so pretty!
PS, don't miss out on the easter eggs at the end of the video.
We look at the past and forget.
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.
Why am I hitting fluff with sticks? Read on my friends, it's fun.
You know how you read or watch a nifty thing and you think you have the skills to do it. You just never take that final step to trying the new thing. Maybe you aren't confident you will do it right? Maybe you let yourself get stuck on the tiniest detail (how long should my whippy willow rods be - I need specific numbers people! How many inches? No one will tell me, never mind, I now have a good excuse to return to my comfort zone.)
My friend Brenda took away my excuse not to try this nifty thing. During the Virtual Sheep to Shawl, she set up a willowing station. It was so much fun, why wait so long to try this?
So I did what I do, and I took my new skill home and pushed it to the limits to find out what it can and cannot accomplish. While exploring this skill, I discovered that there aren't many resources for it on the internet, so I made a video.
The problem is, it's not the kind of video easily done within my comfort zone.
My preference is to have as little as me as possible in the film, be it visual or voice. I'm not that interesting, why would anyone want to waste their time listening to me... or so the voices in my head tell me.
But this is more limiting than liberating. I have a list (currently 5 pages long) of videos I want to make for you, but I don't want to make half-ass videos. Each video I make, I want it to build my skills and to provide something useful to the world. I have a lot to say on many topics and doing it silently wouldn't do it justice.
I'm not sure if I'm saying this clearly.
But learning the skills I need to make better videos is like flogging myself with whippy willow rods.
This video passes a huge milestone in my journey. I cannot say how much courage it took, because I suspect for most people, this act would take no courage at all.
Put simply, I do a lot of talking. A voiceover for the whole video describing with a touch of storytelling in hopes of making a technical tutorial interesting.
Emotionally and physically this is exhausting. But I did it. I published it. No one yet has noticed (or at least mentioned) the mistakes I made with my speech impediment (mid-Atlantic accent mishmash that let a few regional flaws slip through)
These videos take longer to make, so I'll probably be alternating between longer with talking and shorter something silly videos for a while. At least until I get into my grove.
But it's a lot like willowing - a lot of fun and I don't know what took me so long to try it.
If you like this sort of thing and want to see more of it, here are some things you can do to support me on my creative journey.
- go to youtube and give me a thumbs up! Or even a subscribe! That would be awesome
- or pop over to my Etsy shop and support me that way.
I'm desperately trying to wash the rest of the wool before the rainy season sets in. Even on hot summer days, it takes two days to dry the wool enough for long term (air/bug tight) storage. In the winter (aka, rainy season)... well, it's a challenge.
The other challenge is in the warm weather, the animals get first priority with the well water. So there aren't many days when I can wash the wool.
Washing in the garden helps, because then the dirty water not only waters the plants but it adds a lot of benefit to the garden.
Orvas paste is pretty much pure SLS (sodium lauryl sulfate) which is extremely unpopular in cosmetics and soaps these days. SLS makes a lot of suds and is often added to shampoo or detergent to make it look like it is working. We are trained that bubbles do the cleaning (this is not true, but it is believed).
A lot of people have skin sensitivities to modern detergents and soaps. Quite often SLS gets blamed for this. So they buy things that are SLS-free. Their skin gets better.
Sometimes SLS is the cause. But more often, I suspect the problem is poor quality control of the ingredients. If a company takes the effort to remove the most common additive, then it is probably paying a lot more attention to the ingredients that do go into the product.
I think this for two reasons. One, quite often I am washing wool with someone and I stick my hand in the Orvas Paste and they stick their hands in it either. Then they comment, oh wow, this is awesome stuff, I normally get a rash. Then they panic from it being SLS. But still no rash.
The other reason is my own skin is hypersensitive to just about every soap. Even real soap made from lye and oils can cause massive blisters. Orvas paste is one of the very few things I can use without hurting my skin.
Orvas paste is often used to wash babby animals, like lambs and goats.
It's also quickly biodegradable so it's safe to use on the garden without having to dilute the wash water first. Most other washing substances I've tried, kill the plants - always test on a section of lawn before using in the garden.
Most of all, I love how quickly it rinses out of the fibre. All the other detergents and soaps I've tried, take a lot of rinses to get the residue off.
But if it causes a reaction to your skin, then don't use it. Test a small area of skin first.
Also, different cleaners react differently with different minerals in the water supplies, so always do a small batch to test.
Orvas paste:
If you like this sort of thing and want to see more of it, here are some things you can do to support me on my creative journey.
- go to youtube and give me a thumbs up! Or even a subscribe! That would be awesome
- or pop over to my Etsy shop and support me that way.
