Mindless Ramblings of a Wool Playing Man

So much of carding, spinning and even weaving requires me to use only a small portion (of whatever is left) of my brain. I have to pay a bit of attention to what I am doing but most of the work is really about not getting in the way of my muscles that, through hours and hours of practice, have been trained to the activity. That leaves a portion of my brain to wander around investigating the little corners of my mind where useless fact and thoughts have been long buried. I have been carding this morning, listening to The Band's "The Last Waltz".

Carding is a boring but necessary process. It takes the wool fibres that are tangled and aligns them all in the same general direction while at the same time getting rid of most of the bits and pieces of vegetable matter that is still in the wool. I can spend hours and hours standing in front of the machine, slowly cranking the handle and feeding in the wool.

There is lots of time to think of other things; I am never too sure what triggers thoughts or how I reach the conclusions I do. Occasionally I try to back track the thought process but more often than not I get lost down some byway or other. Today my mind wandered to facial tissue (most of us in Canada just call it Kleenex but that is a brand name - not a generic descriptor of a product). I started to think about Kleenex because I have been sneezing a lot lately - sometime six or seven times in a row. After the bout of sneezing my nose runs. Maybe it is allergies or something. I, for most of the winter, have being using some old handkerchiefs as opposed to Kleenex to blow my nose. I think most of handkerchiefs are linen. A few of them have been washed so many times that they are quite soft. After my morning bout of sneezing I started to wonder how many boxes of facial tissues we use in Canada each year - especially in the cold and flu season. My mind then wander over to the section in my brain reserved for environmental issues and wondered how many trees were cut down each year so that we could blow our noses on disposal tissues.

I could not find any statistic on Canadian use but a blog entitled Green Groundswell suggests that "255,360,000,000 disposable facial tissues" are used in the USA every year. That is a lot of paper! While each sheet uses only an impossibly small percentage of a tree - it has got to add up.

I wonder how many people who are protesting clear cuts - blow their noses using facial tissues?

My mind then wandered to other environmental concerns - specifically dental floss. Dental floss is made from petroleum products (nylon). There is not a lot of scientific date on the use of dental floss but most of the sites suggest that in North America, we purchase about 4,828,032 kms of dental floss a year (Evergreen). That is enough dental floss to go around the earth 120 times! All of that tough, almost indestructible thread ends up either in landfills or even worse in our sewers.

I wonder if people who think that we should  start to live in a world without carbon based products such as petroleum floss?

As I said - carding gives me lots of time to think - unfortunately it is seldom about things that are very useful.