Weaving

I want to be a weaver/spinner. I want to know if I have the self-discipline to do it full time. Could I work at it 40-50 hours a week and make enough product to support myself? Am I a good enough weaver/spinner so that what I produce, people will want? I think I need to find out. Last November I decided to find out, or at least to start the process of finding out. The next few blogs will talk about how successful my attempts to be more productive have been. Myy target for the winter semester was to produce nine 31inch x 40inch  throw rugs.

In the late fall I purchased five raw fleeces. That is a lot of wool. The fleeces are fresh from the farm and are incredibly dirty with clumps of mud and manure almost welded to the low hanging parts of the fleece. Even if one soaks these clumps in hot soapy water for 24 hours, the substance may not soften. As well depending upon where that particular sheep has wandered, the fleece may contained well embedded into the fibers a variety of seeds, twigs, burrs and unidentified vegetable matter.  Above all else the fleece is greasy. While various hand lotion advertisements may tell you about the advantages of natural lanolin, the fact of the matter is that it is sticky, gunky and on a raw fleece, dirty. If you play with a fleece for an hour, your hands are not soften – they are just sticky and dirty.

But the fleeces are also beautiful. They have this luxurious soft golden glow that makes me ache to play with it, to wash, card, dye, spin and weave with it. I sometimes wish there was a way of keeping that soft colour, but much of it disappears with washing.

The fleeces also smell which is why they are stored in garbage bags in some plastic bins out on my little balcony.

I buy my wool from Tom who lives out on the fourth concession. He is an interesting man. He is a professor of geography at Trent University. He is an environmentalist and has done much to create a culture of sustainability on that campus. He also has a rather eclectic flock of rare and perhaps even endangered domesticated fowl. Wandering around his house are varieties of turkeys and ducks that use to be common in the barnyards of settlers but are no longer used in commercial enterprises. Tom has for example these incredibly beautiful white turkeys. What makes them unique is that most turkeys can not breed naturally. (They have been breed to have such large chests that it is not possible for …use your imagination) These turkeys can breed naturally. When I saw the Tom turkey with all of his feathers arrayed it truly was a magnificent sight.

Of course, for my purposes, what Tom has that I want is a flock of Cotswold sheep. Cotswold are one of the original breeds of England. It was this breed that allowed Britain to become the world’s leading producer and distributer of woolen cloth. It was this breed of sheep that for generations drove much of Britain’s economic growth. They were equally as popular and successful in North America. According to an internet site (http://museum.gov.ns.ca/rfm/en/home/whattoseedo/animals/sheep.aspx) by the end of the last century there were 75,000 purebred Cotswold sheep in the Americas. However by the 1980s there were approximately only 35 ewes in Canada. People no longer raising sheep primarily to produce wool, but to produce meat.

 I first used a Cotswold fleece when I was living in Victoria. One of the professors in the Sociology department had some fleeces that she didn’t want. She gave me a few fleeces to play with. She had got her breeding stock from Tom who I didn't meet until I came back to Ontario. My life is full of those strange inter-connections.

 I think Tom would admit that he does not worry about the fleeces as much as perhaps he could. Farmers who are in the business of producing sheep that have great fleeces spend a lot of time making sure that their fields are clear of briars etc. Some even keep the blankets or coats on their sheep all year around so that their wool doesn’t get affected by the sun on by whatever is in the fields. Their fleeces, while they are less work, are four to five times more expensive. Tom's fleeces are very reasonable, but their is a bit more work to them and a lot more waste.

The first step is to lay out the fleece and see what I have purchased. I use an old sheet The darkest wool of the left side of the fleece as shown in the above picture is probably so dirty that I just threw those sections away.

The next step is washing.....