Category Archives: Crafts

Back to traditional stuff for a while

Posted by thetinfoilhatsociety in common sense, Crafts, Economy, Independence Days, preparedness, sustainability

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While there are months and months worth of posts I could make about the political state of America, ultimately the best use of my time is in keeping my home.  Above you see my newest purchase.  This is Claudette.  She’s a reproduction Appalachian style great wheel, 7/8 scale.  I bought her from a man who used to make and sell them out of St. Michael’s in Prescott during the 70′s.  This was his last one; he said if there were a demand he would begin making them for sale again so I gave his name and phone number out at my last guild meeting.

Claudette has a learning curve akin to that of learning to spin on a traditional double drive wheel like Miss Saxony did.  Meaning that, while children for hundreds of years *did* learn to spin on a wheel like this, it’s not the way I would teach a beginner now.  Too much frustration for someone modern who hasn’t had the joy of creating yarn already.  I did some research and discovered that, much like a fine stringed instrument, she needs rosin on her drive band to truly work well.  I haven’t done that yet but I have a goal of being able to spin decently on her by the time the May Fair on the Square is upon us.  I want to demo on her.

I am ordering a custom spinning wheel; I finally paid more than the 50% down payment just this morning.  Carson Cooper is the maker.  Unfortunately he has not updated his website with a photo of the wheel I am ordering; it is called the Eirny and will have an accelerator on it that enables it to spin at ratios up to 50:1.  Now for those of you who don’t know what a ratio is, it is the number of times the bobbin/flyer mechanism spins per one revolution of the drive wheel.  On the great wheel above, the ratio is 40:1 but being a spindle wheel, it limits the type of yarn that can be spun.  Miss Saxony has a ratio of approximately 7:1 because she was originally designed as a flax wheel.  Flax, from which linen is made, is a very long fiber – 18 or more inches, very strong, and doesn’t need much twist to hold it together.  Wool, or especially cotton, require LOTS of twist to hold them together.  Wool not nearly so much as cotton due to the crimp inherent in most wools and the scales like human hair has.  When I spun cotton on Miss Saxony, I was treadling like a hamster on a wheel to hold it together!  It worked, but it would be nice to be able to spin it without working quite so hard.

The main reason I am buying this custom wheel though has to do more with preparedness for what the future may offer.  Quite simply, after having done the research, I want a wheel that will stand up to the test of time, and I want to support craftsmen/women who are keeping these crafts alive.  Gods know we’ll need them in the future.  This wheel truly incorporates the best of modern technology – brass bearings to reduce friction in the bobbins, and all the high speed turning areas – with traditional technology – hand turned wood, drive band made of traditional cotton cord.  It’s going to hold up to the rigors of production spinning because it’s made by a spinner who is also a collector of antique wheels and knows what a spinner needs and wants in a wheel.  It’s made with attention to detail, individually, by a craftsman who is fully aware that his wheels will be an heirloom to be handed down.  That is what I thought I was getting when I bought my Mach 1 and is exactly what I did not get.  It is ironic that I had to buy a spinning wheel nearly 150 years old to actually get a true production wheel, and to truly appreciate the technology.

 

We are getting a trailer load of manure delivered next week; we have to mend ALL of the fencing thanks to the javelina.  We can’t plant anything until we fix all the holes.  Mr. Tin Foil said we need a crossbow and I am thinking that might be a very, very good idea – the ultimate silent killer of javelina!  Roast game for dinner, anyone?  After all, they are an invasive species.

We decided we are not going to devote much space to tomatoes this year.  Two years in a row, thanks to our weird (although probably new normal) weather we have lost 50 tomato plants to a late frost and had to start over.  Because the new plants never had a chance to get established before the weather became brutally hot, they never really produced enough to make them worthwhile.  Since I have been getting tomatoes in bulk from the coop anyway that will be our plan for this year rather than try to grow our own.  We still plan to have a couple of roma plants, and the requisite cherry tomatoes in buckets as we do every year.

We are going to devote more space to beans, peas, cucumbers, lettuce, eggplant, peppers, and lots of herbs and spices.  We eat a lot of Indian food as well as Middle Eastern food and latitude/climate wise, we can grow much of our own spices.  I don’t know how productive we’ll actually be, but it will be fun to experiment.  Plus, I would like to grow herbs to tincture, to put into soaps and lotions, and to dry.  Oh, and to dye with.  I’m being honest but I can just hear the groans from Mr. Tin Foil when he reads that last sentence!

We are also going to redo the garden beds again this year; last year we were spending upwards of an hour and a half a day to water the front and back.  We are redoing the beds to incorporate drip irrigation into at least some of the beds.  It just makes more sense, plus it’s water smart, and we will be able to expand into other areas that require hand watering with a significantly smaller time commitment.  Mulch will hopefully play a much larger role this year as well.

I plan to do some guerilla gardening in my next door neighbor’s yard; he is dead now but he left large, well-tended beds as well as mature grape vines and an apricot tree.  I plan to fertilize the grapes and the tree with the manure we get, and to water the tree at least weekly.  I am hoping to get a harvest from the tree this year.  I may also plant corn in his beds as he used to do, though I don’t plan to water every day like he did.  We’ll see how our garden goes first.

I sold one of my looms to a friend; I just didn’t enjoy weaving on it very much.  It opened up space and hopefully it will give many hours of enjoyment to my friend.  I still have my home made monster that says she was made for me (or at least someone with the same name as me).  She is in need of a little rehab but is still usable for the time being. I have a couple of projects in my head that need to actually get warped up — time is running out for Fair items!

School is going well, grade wise.  Interaction wise once again I realize that my background is vastly different than most of the people in my class, thanks to the fire and EMS career, and that I have a much more cynical and realistic outlook than they.  I also am reminded that I am becoming a nurse practitioner for vastly different reasons than they are, mine having a lot more to do with making sure my neighbors have access to medical care for as far into the future as I can work, and focusing on preventative and herbal treatments that are affordable for all.

I have been trying to stay off the internet except for a limited time each day.  I find that I avoid doing what needs to be done by spending far too much time on political, apocalyptic, doomer, prepper, and other forums at the cost of my serenity and productivity.  I just can’t get that involved if I want to maintain my GPA and my sanity.  I also am finding I sleep much better if I limit my time – even watching netflix seems to affect my sleep quality.  I’m not sure why that is but I do notice the difference.  Something about the computer waves is affecting me, I just don’t know what, and life is better and more productive if I limit my time in front of it.

I need to finish plying the yarn I made for my oldest son’s Cobblestone sweater.  I made a lighter weight yarn than the original pattern called for, but that’s because he tends to keep the heat jacked up rather than putting on a sweater.  I’m hoping it will make it wearable for him if it’s lighter.  And yes, I know that it’s March and I was supposed to have this done by last Christmas!  Maybe a combined Christmas/birthday present will happen.

That’s all.  I hope your gardens grow well, your spinning wheels spin true, and you are ready for the next step on the journey!

 

 

The real wealth of our nation

Posted by thetinfoilhatsociety in common sense, Crafts, Economy, home, sustainability, the dreaded politics

Gene Logsden at The Contrary Farmer is a brilliant man, a farmer who is one in the real sense of the word, and who is a thoughtful writer and I believe a poet at heart.  He has a new post up regarding ‘self made’ farmers, or Yeomen as he calls them.  I read his new post nodding to myself the whole while, but it was some of the responses to his post that inspired this one.

The day capitalism, as it is now understood, entered the farming community is the day real farming died.  Agribusiness is what now exists for the most part.  Farming involves being at boot level – and sometimes eye level – with TRUE wealth – the land.  Agribusiness involves large air conditioned vehicles, airplanes, computer programs, subsidies, and debt.

What Chiara eludes to is tenant farming, which was a viable method of farming and small holding in Europe for many hundreds of years, and found its demise beginning as far back as the 1500’s when Henry VIII decided that a cash crop, wool, was more important to his personal wealth and power than his subjects.  Of course, there was also that little bit about ‘needing’ a son and lusting after the Church’s wealth.  This lust of course was fueled by the sudden influx of gold and silver to the Spanish via the New World; the resulting wealth unbalanced the power structure of Europe.  The Spanish had driven the Muslims out of Spain a mere 100 years before, and had managed to decimate their country in the process.  They willfully destroyed a productive agricultural and cultural system that was called, with good reason, the Jewel of the World.  Of course, the destroying the agriculture destroyed the nation and it was necessary for the rulers to find another means of bankrolling the country, and FAST.  Their last ditch effort was the expeditions by Columbus  in the late 1400’s to find a trade route to the East that didn’t involve Muslim hands.  Instead of trade routes, he found a society ripe for pillaging.  And pillage they did.

These factors interacted together to destroy a system that had been mutually beneficial for both land holders and land users across Europe and indeed the entire of the Muslim empire.  The end result of loving gold more than people reverberates down the centuries and affects each one of us directly today.

Even in the ‘golden days’ of tenant farming, there was no unbridled capitalism as we know it.  Guilds had exclusive rights that were procured via royal decree to produce goods and services; their products were protected by law and they were diligent in making sure guild members had the skills and knowledge required to produce quality goods.  They did this in order to maintain that exclusive right.

It is also worth mentioning that barter was the basic way of conducting business – A sheep herder would receive back so much spun yarn in trade for his wool; the spun yarn could be traded for fabric or goods from yet another merchant; those goods in turn could be used to pay rents or taxes to the landlord.  The poor acquired permission to ‘wool gather’ in the fields of the sheep and helped with household chores in return.  Money was not, for most of society, the means of trade.  Everyone understood that the land was the source of their sustenance and was the source of wealth.  Until the ‘discovery’ of the New World, that is.  The resulting flood of precious metals into the Old World shifted the focus of the entire culture away from maintaining the land to lusting after money.  Without the overarching need to protect the lands as the source of wealth, societies began to over-harvest trees for ship building for further transfers from the New to the Old worlds, which resulted in the decimation of the forests and the loss of the native wildlife.  This in return meant that the average subject was pushed off the land into the cities, increasing the poor populations which encouraged disease to spread.  It also meant that inventions were sought to replace what the tenant farmers and guilds had originally provided:   the food, goods, and services necessary to the running of a society.  It is sobering to think that the seeds of our industrial society, our current views of wealth and capitalism, were sown in the 1400’s.

It is the primacy of money over wealth that has been the downfall of our worldwide system.  Capitalism, in its strictest sense, simply doesn’t work.  One cannot value money over land, livestock, and people without destroying the true wealth –which is the land, livestock, and people.  Only when society at large realizes this, and concurrently realizes that wealth requires work, will the disaster we face begin to be mitigated.  I do not hold out much hope for that though.  Not as long as there are TV’s everywhere.

Thinking two seasons ahead

Posted by thetinfoilhatsociety in common sense, Crafts, Economy, Independence Days, preparedness, Uncategorized

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Originally uploaded by susancoyotesfan

Like our ancestors, it is time to start thinking about being warm this winter. Since hand made items take time, it means that if I want to have gifts for holiday giving and warm things for myself, now is the time to start making them.

I spun this yarn earlier this summer; I dyed 775 feet of it with cake dye; it turned out a heathered color that ranges from a deep sky blue to a royal purple. The rest I left the natural color.

While I’ve taken projects from dirty fleece to finished object, this is the first of many projects that I plan to take from dirty fleece to woven object. Like most of my ‘firsts’ this scarf has issues – but it is my first attempt at weaving with my hand spun and I’m happy to report that my yarn is more than strong enough for the stresses of weaving.

In keeping with thinking two seasons ahead, the fall garden will be planted later this week. We’ll grow broccoli, cauliflower, and carrots, as well as chard. I’ll try cabbage again, but I don’t hold out a lot of hope for it.

I’ll be placing an order with Johnny’s Seeds for some greenhouse plastic and the clips to hold it to PVC pipe; I think I can manage a cold frame that won’t blow away this winter. I’ll also be hedging my bets with my free sliding glass doors, using those over a couple of our beds and getting hay bales as necessary to keep the glass high enough to allow the plants growing room.

I have to go back to work soon; I am not sure how I feel about that. In the mean time, I’ve been busy preserving the bounty of summer. If it were from our own garden I’d be happier, but from the farmer’s coop is good too. So far I’ve made 100 pounds of tomatoes into sauce with 25 pounds blanched and waiting in the freezer to be made into paste. Today I roasted 30 pounds of green chiles and put them into our freezer. Mr. TF was aghast at the sheer poundage until I reminded him that last year we got 15 lbs from the store and it wasn’t enough.

I’ve been drying herbs like rosemary, oregano, thyme, and marjoram; I need to get out into the garden and pick basil to make into pesto for the winter.  I wish I could live a little more like our ancestors; I would love to exhaust myself all summer long with projects and preserving, knowing that this winter I will have a well deserved rest time.  Modern life makes that impossible though.

Tour de Fleece, kilt hose, highland games, other nonsense

Posted by thetinfoilhatsociety in comedy, Crafts

Things have been quiet on the blog, but they’ve been humming along here.

First of all, you must be wondering what the Tour de Fleece is…well, it’s a worldwide phenomenon.  It takes place every year on the same dates as the Tour de France.  We spin every day that the Tour rides, and have special challenges along the way like the Tour riders do.  For instance, there’s a speed stage – how many yards/ounces can you spin in one day?  For the mountain stage, we do special challenges — if you’ve never attempted spinning bamboo, this would be a perfect opportunity to try.  There are teams you can join on Ravelry.  I belong to two teams:  Team Russian Underpants (sponsored by the Antique Spinning Wheels group) and Team Bring Me a Shrubbery (sponsored by the Knitters Who Say ‘Ni’ group).  You set your own goals for every stage of the Tour, and you are basically only competing with yourself, but you do that along with thousands of other spinners all over the world.  It’s a lot of fun, and makes me wish the Tour was more often than once a year.  My goal was to spin every day, at least for a few minutes.  I have not accomplished this goal, but I have gotten quite a bit of spinning accomplished.  I had a tragic accident with Ms. Grace on the third day of the Tour which required major surgery; she is not without scars after my botched surgical repairs.

The accident photoMy temporary repair (which worked, but was more than a little rickety): New leather – this involved exacto knives of various sizes, dremel tools, a drill, neatsfoot oil, needle nosed pliers, a trip to Flagstaff to the leather store, a full week of trying to get that leather out, many swear words. This is a poor repair, and I should be embarrassed to post the photo, but I am proud of myself that I actually accomplished a repair on something well over 100 years old.  It’s not perfect, and as restoration goes it’s not even OK, but I didn’t break the maiden (the wood post) and I didn’t affect the functioning of the wheel.  I am happy to once again spin on my workhorse!  I will fix it better eventually, but this repair will last me for quite a while.

I’ve also finished a pair of kilt hose for someone with a 10 inch circumference foot and 17 inch circumference calves.  I think there were enough stitches in those hose for two entire sweaters!  They were a commission and I was so very worried I wouldn’t get them done in time; I even had to put out a nationwide plea for matching yarn to finish the cuffs because the four skeins I had weren’t enough, and the stores don’t carry that yarn in anything but colors now.  No white.

Not very pretty just laying there, but MOST attractive on the wearer.  Thankfully.  I had nightmares they weren’t going to fit, even though I measured both him and the hose throughout the process!

Mr. TF and I went to the Arizona Celtic Highland Games in Flagstaff this past weekend.  Below is what I think is the best shot of the festival:

Isn’t that the most adorable sporran you’ve ever seen???

In other news, I interviewed for a Master’s Program in Family Nurse Practitioner this past week.  Today I found out I was accepted…but I am on a waiting list and my tentative start date is EIGHT TO TEN MONTHS from now.  Apparently they’ve been overrun with applications due to the upcoming change to requiring a doctorate by the NP licensing board.  Hopefully enough people get in at other programs that I don’t have to wait that long.

That’s about it.  Just working on my business (like spinning or weaving is work – yet), cleaning and organizing, and taking it easy.  Trying not to think about what will come next, because that makes my stomach knot up and my heart race.

What’s been going on at Tin Foil Acres?

Posted by thetinfoilhatsociety in common sense, Crafts, home, Independence Days

Lots of things.

The psychiatrist I saw, as well as the counselor, both said they are seeing a lot of nurses with the same stress related issues; one even said that ER and ICU nurses are getting the worst of it.  So I guess it’s not me, it’s just that I don’t have very good coping skills.  And that’s my homework for the next few months.  ‘Nuf said about that.

While I have read two novels – the first non-fiction I’ve read in more than two years – I haven’t been lying around eating bon bons.  Things have been busy here.  I’ve been weaving along on an 8 yard warp of cotton boucle towels; I cleaned, organized, and labelled all our spices; I cleaned the kitchen to my exacting standards and have been doing my best to keep it that way; together we have been working in the garden which has been very very nice; we have put up fencing in half the front yard and I’m working on lining the bottom with rocks to keep out the rabbits and skunks; I’ve been spinning and knitting and even dying a little; and I applied for a business license for my little fiber arts factory.  This last is because if I want to sell at craft fairs or events, I have to have one.  Plus it allows me to buy at cost without paying the taxes, which means that I can actually attempt to make a little money from my crafting; especially for weaving, if I have to buy at retail and pay taxes on my supplies, it means that I work and sell for free.  Not exactly what I had in mind.  I do plan to do a post on the relative costs of ready – made clothing from the turn of the 20th century to the 21st, but it might be a bit.

I have also been canning.  Yes, it’s that time of year again, and I’m grateful not to have to try to fit this in between grueling shifts right now.  I spent 9 hours one day making blueberry jam, strawberry jam, and peach butter.  I buy in bulk from Bountiful Baskets which is like a coop or a CSA but you don’t have to have a subscription and you’re not obligated to buy every week.  So when they have something in bulk I want, I buy the basket which allows me to buy the bulk items as well.  This time I got five pounds of strawberries and 25 pounds of peaches; the blueberries have been in the freezer for a while and I wanted to just do it all at once and get it done.  I can outside on my camp stove so I don’t heat up the house, which means that at times I come in to get out of the heat.  Unfortunately, I got distracted during my first batch of peach butter (6 hours into the marathon day) and it boiled – and burned badly – to the bottom of my pot.  Ugh.  I’m still alternating elbow grease and SOS pads with oven cleaner to try to get the mess off the bottom of the pot.   Good thing my time is cheap right now.

Time off from ‘official’ work, but no rest for the weary here!  Truly, home making is a full time job; most days I try to be up by 6 or 630 so we can get the watering and gardening maintenance done before the heat sets in; then breakfast and reading the news; then to work on the home tasks; then spinning or knitting or designing  or weaving, whichever has been neglected the most recently.  Then more outside stuff, then dinner, then a walk around the neighborhood.  By the time 9 pm rolls around I’m pretty well beat.  And that’s about it for around here.

Spinning a little history

Posted by thetinfoilhatsociety in common sense, Crafts, home, sustainability

I spin my own yarns; I learned to spin in 2002 but didn’t get serious about it until 2005.  I became interested in spinning after I began knitting regularly again; quality yarns aren’t cheap, and the only way I could afford the kinds of yarn I wanted to knit with was to learn to spin my own.  I began my spinning journey with a very modern wheel which as with many things modern, looks pretty cool, seems like it’s a good idea, but just doesn’t hold up to actual use.  In fact, it mostly sat in my living room because I had such a difficult time actually spinning with it.  It required a large brick wedged behind it to keep it from creeping across the floor because it’s so light, and the type of tension mechanism on the bobbin meant that for me as a beginner, once I filled that bobbin I was never going to get the tension the same for the next one.   In 2005  I took my spinning wheel, that PVC Babe, with me every Wednesday for six weeks to a “learn to spin” class in Mesa.  That is how I learned that while a $200 wheel *can* be a good bargain — if it’s the right one — it was not a good bargain for me because I really didn’t like this wheel.  So, once again, that wheel sat in the corner, neglected and unloved, while I finished up school and dreamed of spinning with a ‘real’ wheel.

Now, I do respect the contributions of modern technology.  Antibiotics are literally life savers, and I probably wouldn’t be here today if they weren’t around; a good many of the people I know today would also be either dead or handicapped in some way without antibiotics.  But, as with any technology, it can and has been misused and overused, and the downsides we are beginning to see today.  Spinning wheels today are also the product of modern technology; many makers have devoted a lot of time and effort into producing a wheel that utilizes the best engineering designs one can think of to produce wheels that are light, clean looking, and give spinners features they desire.  Spinolution is one such company.

So, when I decided that the problem was indeed, the wheel and not my inability to spin, I began doing research.  I initially decided I was not interested in an antique wheel, because I didn’t know enough about how wheels worked in general to know how to fix one, and I didn’t yet know there was a HUGE spinning and weaving guild right in my neighborhood.  I also didn’t think I was interested in a traditional style of wheel (like what you think of when you think of a wheel probably) because I wanted something small and light that I could get out and put in the corner when I was done.  I wanted a wheel that would be easy to spin on, without a lot of gadgets or requiring constant fiddling, and I didn’t want to have to change bobbins very often.  When I completed my research, I went to the newly discovered local fiber store, and there was a Mach 1 there as a display, just waiting for me to try out.  I went home with that wheel a week later, convinced I had eluded all possible spinning related problems — it was already finished, so no warping; it had sealed bearings, so no oiling; it had a carry handle and wheels, so easy movement; HUGE bobbins so no frequent changes.

Three years later, I realized that buying a wheel that looks and spins NOTHING like many traditional wheels doesn’t mean I avoided spinning related – rather, technology related – problems.  The unique treadle design whereupon the double treadle is a unit, and the wheel has an offset pittman arm, is warping AWAY from the pittman arm and I have already put spacers in it to try to correct for that.  It is getting worse, and eventually I may not be able to treadle at all.  Those ginormous bobbins I was so happy about?  Well, they’re so heavy that I have frequent breaks in my yarn while plying.  Plus, I can’t fill them more than half way if I’m going to do certain types of plying because the finished yarn doesn’t all fit on the bobbin if I do. To make matters worse, the drive band is rubber and I’ve been through SEVEN  of them in the three years I’ve had the wheel!  Now, for someone concerned about TEOTAWTKI this was a really poor choice for a wheel, which I hadn’t realized when I bought it.   This and other problems sent me on a quest to learn exactly HOW my spinning wheel worked, how it was similar to others and how it was different, and how traditional wheels (and those based on traditional designs) overcome those problems.  In the course of my research, I realized that many of the problems I was experiencing did not exist in traditional wheels, and that they were designed the way they were for very good and sound engineering principles, time tested from the Middle Ages until the present.

Enter the beauty above.  She is an antique.  Her table — the slanty piece of wood — is solid oak, with tiny little fluted designs like a pie crust on each end.  The turnings are maple, I believe; I don’t know for sure but that was a very common type of wood for turnings (the legs, axle arms, etc).  She was probably made in the Midwest and brought out here in the late 1800′s; she was a Chandler based wheel for at least the last 70 years, so I assume she came out with Mormon pioneers from Nebraska or something like that.  She was purchased in the late 40′s or early 50′s by a woman in Chandler who passed down to her daughter, who passed it to her daughter.  The first two generations of women used it for decoration, never to spin, but she was in a climate controlled home, with regular dusting and occasional waxing, for all those years.  I bought it from the 3rd generation woman to have it, who didn’t want it – it didn’t fit with her decor.  I couldn’t believe it when I saw her, but she was in good working order other than some minor issues and I paid a very reasonable price for her.

Her flyer – the part that holds the bobbin, and has a profile like a bird in flight had a large crack on one side, and the hooks that hold the yarn were rusted through.

Luckily, this is only on one side, and I was able to remove and replace the hooks on the other.  Her bobbin was glued to the flyer shaft because of years of dried oil and shellac mixing with dirt, but I was able to free it, clean it, and restore it to working order in a matter of two days of alcohol, Q tips, elbow grease, and a dremel tool with a grinding attachment (to help ream out the dried stuff from the inside of the bobbin hole).  Several coats of Feed N Wax later, and the addition of a drive belt made from crochet cotton, she was ready and willing to spin. She’s not a wheel for a beginner, and I finally know enough and have enough skill to be up to the challenge of a wheel like her.

It was truly an awesome and eery feeling to know that I was the first person in probably 70 years to spin on her.  The wheel probably spun enough yarn and flax to clothe a family for a lifetime, and then sat for a lifetime.  She’ll be well taken care of here, and put to work as she was designed.  The small bobbin problem I was so afraid of is compounded by the fact that she only has one — so I will need to be creative in my solutions for that.  There are solutions, though.   I have learned more about spinning wheel technology and workings in the last month than I learned in the last 10.

Oh, and one more wheel:  Henrietta.  I bought her at an antique store right after I got Miss Saxony (reference to the style of wheel) thinking that I could swap flyers and have an extra bobbin.  Nope.  Nice try though.  So now I have a true flax wheel with a distaff (holds flax for spinning) that can also double as a travel wheel, because she’s so light.

She’s a cute little thing, but she doesn’t capture my heart the way Miss Saxony does.  She’s in good shape minus a few minor problems, and she spins wool not so well, but I can’t wait to try flax on her.  She is a true flax wheel and doesn’t want to spin wool – the flyer doesn’t spin fast enough to put enough twist in the wool to hold it together.  Flax is such a long fiber it doesn’t need very much twist.

So that’s my journey on the technology path of spinning.  I started out completely high tech, and have ended up completely traditional.  I plan to keep my Mach 1, and hopefully I can get her fixed, and she’ll end up being my plying wheel for sure.  Those ginormous bobbins will be good for something!

New Loom

Posted by thetinfoilhatsociety in Crafts

This is my newest loom, it’s a 4 harness 36 inch weaving width Schact folding loom.  I got it for an insane price, and couldn’t pass it up.  It *does* need work, but can weave just as it is.  The bags of yarn you see next to the larger loom in the background are my take from the annual silent auction — much of that is cotton chenille and will become new towels and washcloths.  Some is linen and will become napkins and table cloths; I prefer to learn on stuff I get for next to nothing so that I am not paralyzed by the fear of making mistakes.  The rest is wool of various weights; some will work for rugs if I weave them with the plan that they get felted into smaller, tighter packages.  The rest will become scarves, pillow tops, and samplers for various weaving patterns. There are also two large boxes of coffee stuff that belong to the Guild; I hostessed last month and the normal hostess wasn’t there, so I still have it until next meeting.  It’s out because at first it wasn’t really in the way, but with the new loom the amount of space is rather…small and crowded.  It has to go to someone else for this next meeting, even if the normal hostess isn’t there — I work for the next meeting and won’t be there.

The larger loom in the background will go to a new home, if my friend still wants it — I got it for free, basically, so I’m passing it along.  It isn’t what I had hoped, and it needs to go to a new home soon.  I wanted to weave a few rag rugs on it, but I really could use the room, and I can still make braided rag rugs.

My little folding loom, my first one, the gateway drug into the weaving addiction, is staying.  It’s perfect to take to classes and workshops.  And for sampling.

I can’t wait to actually get caught up on outstanding projects and warp my new loom up!

 

My (belated) Christmas present

Posted by thetinfoilhatsociety in Crafts, Independence Days, sustainability

I got a little cash for Christmas.  That cash went into my overtime fund; I get extras that I want by working overtime or selling craft stuff so that I don’t take anything out of our household budget.  When I got enough, and International Fleeces had their first anniversary sale, I purchased some two row mini combs.  What, you say?  I already have a comb and hackle set?  Yes, well, different products for different uses.  The Blue Mountain Handcrafts set is incredibly useful for wools over 3 inches long.  The mini combs are incredibly useful for fine fibers and for fibers less than 3 inches long.  On the larger comb and hackle set, I would have waste in the combs if the fiber was less than 3 inches.  On the mini combs I have waste that is about 1 inch.  This I can card into other wools for a tweedy blend on my drum carder.  Waste not, want not.

So here is a picture diary of my combs and the absolutely filthy merino wool I washed, dried, and then combed with these new mini combs.

As you can sort of see from this picture, the water is brown from all the mud and the wool looks tan to brown.  What you don’t see are all the manure tags and the vegetable matter (VM) that is stuck into the wool.  Merino, being an especially fine wool, has lots of crimp and therefore EVERYTHING sticks to the fleece when the sheep is out and about.  Everything.

This is the same wool soaking in its second bath.  I heat the water to 150 degrees, squirt enough Dawn detergent (the original, without enzymes) to make the water blue, and soak for 20 minutes.  As you can see, the wool is floating on the water because there’s no longer any dirt, oil, or manure to weight it down.  It expands to at least double its starting dirty size after the second wash.  You can still see all the VM in the wool though.

It gets wrung out in a towel, carefully, after three rinses; each rinse gets a little cooler and the wool soaks in each for at least 10 minutes to allow the scales to slowly close and prevent felting — sticking together.  Then it gets put outside to dry.

That’s where my new mini combs by Valkyrie Supply come in.  I load the combs with fiber, and comb from the ends to the tines.  I make at least two passes; each pass means that the fiber is transferred from the loaded comb to the empty comb.  This leaves the short fibers on the empty comb, and allows the fibers to be all in alignment on the combs, and all of the vegetable matter simply falls to the floor.  Then I diz the combed fibers into a bird’s nest — basically a long piece of the combed fibers that I twist slightly as I wrap into a spiral shape.

These are a bunch of bird’s nests that were combed out of that dirty wool.  Next comes the spinning, and I’ll ultimately end up with something like this:

This is superwash merino that I bought already washed, combed, and ready to spin.  Which feels like cheating :)   But you get the idea.

I’m dying up little 3 and 4 ounce batches of the wool in different colors.  So far I have Kermit the Frog green (it said Leaf Green on the bottle!) and Royal Blue which seems to be coming out more like a cobalt blue.  These may be spun on their own, or may be spun in concert for a varigated self striping yarn.

Some will be carded and combed with my angora fiber and possibly dyed after that.  I’m still thinking of a project for that.

All of this is time consuming, but very satisfying.  I get exactly the fiber I want.  And I learn something new every time I do it!  And then of course there is the fact that when the apocalypse comes, I’ll be able to spin my own fibers and clothe my family with weaving, knitting, crocheting, and sewing.  :)

What’s up lately?

Posted by thetinfoilhatsociety in common sense, Crafts, Economy, home, Independence Days, peak oil, preparedness

My husband commented the other day that my blog isn’t devoted to much of the Tin Foil Hat stuff any more.  I realized he is right.  And there’s really a simple reason for that.  I can comment on whatever’s going on, but it doesn’t change anything.  Or.  I can talk about what I’m doing to make the best of our situation, to make sure we’re ahead of the curve with declining resources, and making due with less.  I can post a long diatribe about the price of food commodities, or I can post what works in our area and climate, and how best to preserve that harvest so others can make use of the information.  I can basically be a cynic, a Cassandra, or I can talk about what I’m doing to work around the obstacles.

So, if you find weaving, spinning, canning, etc boring, I apologize.  They’re simply my answers to thorny problems with no simple solutions.  And I’m finding that with spinning, weaving, and the rest of the fiber arts/home maker arts that the quality is simply so superior to what I can buy (except from other fiber artists of course) that I would rather spend my time making towels, washcloths, clothing, rugs, yarn, and so on.  If the choice is that or spend my money, I’ll spend the time ninety nine times out of one hundred.

Am I as prepared as I would like to be?  Hell no.  But, we won’t starve and we won’t go without proper clothing.  Hopefully we won’t live in a tent but that’s one of those eventualities I simply can’t plan for.  So I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about it.  After all, there are literally hundreds of homes with more land than I have I can move into with little or no rent.  So why worry?