fluffy white stuff

How many pictures—

—of snow—

—and of fleece¹—

—of walk-taking—

—yarn-making²—

—bread baking—³

—seed saving—

—and general—

—wintery—

— messing about—

—can a person draw—

—and relish—

—and share—

—both inside⁴—

—and out—

—before Substack decides—

—it is time—

—to rain on this parade?⁵

Well—⁶

—not nearly as many pictures as I have.

But still—

—quite a few.

1. Fleece from a Cormo ram shorn ten or fifteen years ago, purchased and washed (it was enormous and very very greasy), by my friend Ivy who has been carefully storing it ever since. Recently she split it and I now have half. I’ve been re-scouring it an ounce at a time and oh MY is it lovely. It’s been years since I’ve gotten to spin one of my friend Kate’s fleeces, but for many years a group of us went to shearing at her farm every winter/spring to help with skirting— and (selfishly) to select the fleeces I/we wanted for knitting (and tapestry in my case), for the following year(s). Indeed, the texture of the tapestries from my first decades of weaving were entirely determined by the Kate’s breed choices.

2. I’m going for a “fingers in all the pies at once” approach for this, my first project with this fleece. As I said in the last footnote, I’m washing it an ounce at a time (separating it into locks before washing to avoid any clumping and for maximum cleanliness). Flicking the ends of each lock helps with any long term storage issues, then I hand card as hands and spindle desire. Because I’m using a cross arm it’s easy to wind the inside and outside of each cop together twice to make four strands which I then ply into a super fat fluffy and airy knitting yarn—exacerbating any anomalies, though so far the sweater I’m making has been happy to absorb them. We’ll see when it’s done if I can tell where I switched skeins.

What’s particularly fun is that I get to relish each step and am never overwhelmed by any one of them. And since all the tools are small, it’s easy to keep them handy. All this in contrast to what I first learned (and mostly continue) to do: wash the whole fleece, tease and card a pound or two (usually drum card), spin singles till that fiber is gone, mix them up/randomize the balls of singles to even out any anomalies, then ply, dye (if desired), and finally knit. Or weave.

3. I have totally fallen for locally grown/milled spelt flour. Such flavor.

4. Turns out tapestries make excellent ornaments—even when they state the obvious.

5. i.e. tell me that the post is too long for email, which means you’ll have to click on it and go to your web browser or Substack app to read more.

6. I didn’t include the video I took on the rainy, squishy-snow walk depicted here. Partly because—rainy and squishy and the fluffy snow is more romantic. And partly because it turns out that if you hold a phone up under your hat in an attempt to keep it dry all you can hear in the video (besides drips and splooshy footsteps) is breathing. I found it annoying to listen to and figured you would too.

And yes—we’ve been going continually back and forth between snow and slush with some lovely packed trail ice in between—so thank goodness for my boot spikes which keep me feeling stable.