The Hundred Mile Challenge - a side bar on climate change

The recent trip to Edmonton and through the ice fields of the Canadian Rockies brought me face to face with an issue that affects us all - climate change and our individual responsibility for the effects of our personal behavior on the world in which we live.  The last time I drove that route was thirty four ago.  My children were ten and twelve and we stopped at the Columbia Ice Fields and walked to the foot of the Athabaska Glacier.  During this recent trip the glacier was much changed.  Where a narrow path once wound down from the main road there is now about a kilometer of paved road down to a parking lot.  A further hike takes today's tourist up and over the moraine, once covered in ice and to the foot of the receding glacier.  Markers indicate the fast retreat of the ice and predictions are that, in my grand-children's lifetime this glacier will be gone.  The Athabaska Glacier is the source of three major waterways; the Athabaska River, the Saskatchewan River and the mighty Columbia.  The ice fields are also the source of the Thompson River and the lush, fertile valley through which we had just driven.  The thought that, within the next one hundred years all of this would be gone is terrifying; not just because of the loss of habitat for wild life but also the reality of reduced food production and life sustaining water supplies for the growing communities along that route.

Athabaske Glacier 1979

 

The Athabaska Glacier today. 
The ice has receded over the first moraine and is half way over the second moraine.

For the effects of climate change on our ice from the scientists perspective, check out this article.  We are not discussing these issues and yet Canada is home to some of the worlds largest ice fields and we have a responsibility to protect them. Instead we are focused on the extraction of more of the fuel that is creating the crisis.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/4084c8ee-fa36-11e2-98e0-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2av9RLdmw

I became sadly aware of our own contribution to the problem as we joined our fellow travelers, each in their own vehicles burning up he fossil fuel as we drove through these beautiful places while we listened to the debate on the radio about the building of longer pipelines to transport more fossil fuels across the country.  And I had also chosen to take my wool some one thousand kilometers to the mill when there is a perfectly good mill within a two hour car ride from here.  Expediency and impatience fueled that decision.  The Carstairs mill is better able to handle the volume in a timely way.  Taking the hundred mile challenge and having my wool processed locally might mean some inconvenience in waiting for the final product, but what a price our grand-children will pay for my  current need for immediate gratification.

Which brings me back to our passion for wool.  I have never quite understood the fascination of fellow spinners for seeking out fleece and fiber from the other side of the world.  While Australian merino wool and English Cotswold fleece are wonderful to work with, I have little interest in using the over processed tops of yarn provided to spinners when I have no relationship with the sheep that produced this fiber.  My ancestors did not have the luxury of such finely prepared fibers.  Indeed, my mother plucked fleece off the barbed wire in the field beside her house for her first project.  We need to ask ourselves how we can fulfill our passion while using local fiber.  After all, we share our environment with the animals who live around us.  While our governments have a global responsibility for setting policies to protect our most valuable asset which is water, we need to ask ourselves what we can do to help, one person at a time.

Wool to Market

Since sheering, the past two months have been busy as we have sorted, tagged and cleaned the fleece for delivery to the spinning mill.  Sorting requires further removal of fleece unsuitable for spinning because it is too dirty, brittle or the staple is too long.  The brittleness may result from poor nutrition, stress or exposure to sunlight and the elements while tagging involves removal of all of the badly soiled fleece from the edges of the skirt and the breech.  Of 22  fleece we packed a total of 135 lbs of wool into the truck for delivery to the mill  (67.5 lbs of grey and 68 lbs of white).

Since husband John was going to Edmonton, Alberta for a conference and since the mill is in Alberta, we drove out together and enjoyed the beautiful scenery through our Rocky Mountains.  The trip to Edmonton took us three days.

John with the loaded truck somewhere in the Thompson River Valley.

Once in Edmonton I was grateful to meet a friend from the Salt Spring Weavers and Spinners Guild who also has a residence in that city.  Betty guided me through city traffic and we drove down to the mill together;  a further two and one half hours across the beautiful rolling Alberta countryside.   Since I forgot the map describing the location of the mill in Carstairs, it took some sleuthing and a trip to the local post office to determine the mill is actually located about ten miles out of town on one of the rural section roads.  We saw a beautiful fox on our drive through that part of the countryside.

Destination - Carstairs Custom Woolen Mill

I had not visited the mill before and was interested in seeing the process, particularly how they maintained the integrity of each clients batch and were able to provide assurance that the finished product was indeed the wool sent to them from our sheep on Salt Spring Island.  Betty and I were given a tour of the facility which employs at least eight people.  There are three carding machines as well as spinners, plying machines and other equipment that appears to keep at least two men busy with servicing and repairs.

One of the large carders at work.

The Spinniers.

The plying machine.

Carstairs also provides knitted socks which are produced on a vintage sock machine.  These wool socks are sent all over Canada and have been keeping prairie feet warm for many years.

The sock machine.

I was greatly reassured to see my bags of wool discretely stored in their own numbered stalls as well as numbered batches moving through the mill.  While unsuitable wool of too long a staple may be removed, or substituted if the batch is too small, good sorting and adequate poundage avoids any necessity to do this.  We did bring one small bag of grey wool home that I had set aside and the staple was confirmed as being too long for the spinners.  Much to my husbands amusement, although it traveled and was left in the open bed of the truck all the way home, no-one stole it.

 Stored bags of our grey wool waiting for processing.

 And the white.

Carstairs also has a store in which they offer both yarns and their products for sale.  We arrived in time to find staff taking a much needed break together outside the store.  The day was warm and it was very hot in the barn with all the machinery working.

Staff taking a break in the heat.

 Betty's prize.  A new weaving book.

On our return trip we stopped at a new mill in Innisfree to see their production process.  Exotic Fibers of Canada offer processing of Alpaca and wool and we were interested in comparing their work with the Carstairs mill.  The business is located in an industrial mall on the edge of town.  We entered at a lower level to find a young woman, not wearing a mask and who was dying in an enclosed room with no obvious ventilation.  She directed us upstairs to the office where a man was talking on the phone.  Although his back was toward us, he could not have been unaware that we were standing, waiting to see him.  After 15 minutes during which our presence remained unacknowledged, we left.  The mill equipment could be seen through an upstairs window and there was no evidence of it being used.  The carders were clean and there were no sacks of wool visible.  Perhaps they were stored elsewhere.  We were struck, not only with the  unwelcoming atmosphere but also the inactivity and the obvious lack of concern for employee health compared with the friendly greeting and obvious camaraderie at the Carstairs mill.  I left my card on the desk in an obvious place beside the fellow on the phone but have never received a follow up call or e-mail.

Exotic Fibres of Canada - not a welcoming place.

It will likely be three to six months before I see my spun yarn which the folks at the Carstairs mill will mail back to me.  Meanwhile I kept four brown/black fleece back for hand processing.  That is an interesting process worthy of it's own chapter.

Hannah's Sweater

Each year. Gulf Island Secondary School is host to international student from around the world.  The high school for the islands is located on Salt Spring and so the students are billeted with island families.  Some students do not survive the cultural shock as they transition from large, cosmopolitan centers to a rural environment which has no access to the conveniences of McDonald's or WalMart.  The only 'chain store' on the island just folded because of lack of customers.  In the wintertime, Salt Spring is home to about 10,000 residents. That number increases to 16,000 in the summer with the arrival of summer residents and tourists.

Hannah is a young woman of 16 years of age who came to the island from a large, urban center in Germany.  She was billeted with a member of the SSI Weavers and Spinners Guild on a small homestead on the island's south end. Her hostess also operates a weaving studio and so Hanna became intimately acquainted with fiber processing and decided she would like to take home a sweater knit with Salt Spring wool.  We worked together on the design and settled on a Cowichan style sweater with a maple leaf motif.

Sketches of Hannah's sweater.

Hannah settled on the shorter version on the right.  Three weeks later the sweater was ready, just in time for her return to Germany at the end of the school year in June.

Hannah's sweater

The maple leaf motif was a gift from the Cowichan knitters in their famous sweaters and has been used by several generations of knitters from Salish communities.

I asked Hannah what she would most miss about Salt Spring Island.  She said 'going shopping in her pajamas'.

Bare Naked Ladies

After two false starts, we finally sheared the girls.  Last week, and after a week of rain, Dave called to say Peter, our shearer was arriving on the first ferry on Friday morning.  The prospect of twenty two wet fleece did not cheer me up.  However, the forecast for the coming week was great so we spread tarps out on the grass with plans to dry the wool over the next few days.

Peter arrived with the sunshine, set up and started to work.   He sheared four sheep before badly slicing his thumb in a scuffle with one of the girls who somehow managed to jam his thumb into the gate in the sheepfold.  He spent the next four hours in Lady Minto Hospital waiting for medical attention and came out sporting a heavily bandaged and sutured thumb.

 Maybe it was the shirt that made her do it!

 Shearing was rescheduled for this week and the weather was great – until the night before when once more it clouded over and rained all night.  The sheep were waiting patiently out in the open in the small paddock.  Peter called at 6 a.m. to say he would see if the weather changed and sure enough, the sun came out shortly after eight and dried those woolly coats in time for his arrival at noon.  By one thirty we had 22 naked girls and some very confused lambs who recognized the call but not the new vision their mother presented.   The noise as they sorted themselves out went on for several hours.

 

Shearing is not an elegant process - at least for the sheep.

Note Peter's gloved hand!

It just takes two or three minutes to remove a fleece.  It also takes a lot of skill to handle the sheep and to get them into a position where they 'give up' and let it all happen.  Although they seem to be pleased with the results, they have a great deal of trouble recognizing one another without their coats and even the lambs will go and sniff the fleeces to see if their mother's are somehow still inside those big piles of wool.

There are some lovely grey fleece this year.  The fleece in the forefront is brown/black, soft and lustrous - a definate 'keeper' for hand processing.

All the fleece looks good.  I estimate we sheared about forty five pounds of grey and another fifty pounds of the white; enough when combined with the fleece from Windsor Farms to make up a load for the mill in Carstairs.  There is one lovely brown/black fleece which I may hold back and hand process.  

 I estimate we have over 100 lbs of fleece (unskirted and unsorted).

Next week will be spent skirting, sorting and weighing in preparation for the mill.  We will see if my estimates hold and how much we have left after the sorting process is done.  The fleece is pretty dirty this year due to all the wet winter weather.  The girls take shelter from the rains under the cedar trees and in the hedgerows among the thistles and brambles.

I managed to sort and skirt all of the grey fleece before heading home to pack my bags for a trip to see the Vancouver grandchildren where I even got some knitting done with Naomi and her friend Abby. 

This is what it is all about.

 

 Bare Naked Ladies.

2013 Vancouver Island Fleece and Fibre Festival

This was the fourth year for this highly successful festival held in Coombs on Vancouver Island.  The theme for fibre nuts is to take the 100 mile challenge and to use only local fibres in their craft.   Craftspeople from all over Vancouver and the Gulf Islands and the lower mainland of B.C. attend to shop for yarns, fleece and other related products. 

This year, Mary traveled up to Coombs with me which meant an early morning start to catch the 7 a.m. ferry across to Vancouver Island and then a one hour drive north through Nanaimo and Parksville to the little community of Coombs, best known for the emporium with goats grazing on the roof.  We were set up and ready to go by 9 a.m.  Sales were steady and I parted with about one third of the hand dyed yarns I had prepared as well as many of the natural coloured wool cones.  In fact I sold out of the grey cones which are great for weaving.  Mary keeps reminding me not to fret - the sheep are growing more every day!

Mary behind the counter with her drop spindle

I had taken along Emily's vest with the humming bird pattern and was also knitting an adult vest with a sheep motif (just visible in front of Mary on the table).  If I had taken kits of these items with the patterns they would have sold well as there was lots of interest.  I have promised potential customers that I will be posting the patterns in the next two weeks so watch this spot and my web site.  The 3 ply yarn in grey and white that I had milled at Carstairs Custom Woolen Mill in Alberta is a good weight for these vests and the colour definition is great for this type of knitting pattern.

I was also pleased with the interest in the hand dyed yarns.  I had dyed both white and grey skeins in the same dye baths for complementary colour shades primarily for weaving.  The muted shades dyed over the grey wool were the ones that sold well.

 

 

The turquoise colour on the left was in the same dye bath as the more muted shade on the right.

 

 

 The bright colours drew the eye but the muted shades were the ones that sold.

It was a great festival, both for vendors and for shoppers who learned from one another and came away with many new project ideas and uses for their fibre.  I certainly learned a lot about what people want to buy and about presentation.  It was also very gratifying to have customers return to purchase yarns that worked well for them over the past year.  Mary and I made some new friends; found some familiar faces and got caught up on the latest fibre news and came home tired but very satisfied with the day.  For me, it was also great to have the company and the help.

The next task is shearing the flock then skirting and sorting fleece; deciding where to get this years fleece processed; packing it; and sending it off to the mill.  Mary is right!  I should not be worried about having parted with any of it - it just keeps coming.............

Weaving, Spinning, Knitting and Gardening

We have been blessed with glorious weather and I can hear the weeds growing as I work in my studio.  I have a spring sale coming up at the end of May so have spent as much time as possible out on my deck, dying yarns.  I have created complimentary shades of white and grey wool dyed in the same dye pots.  The results will make wonderful shades for weaving so if they do not sell at the 100 mile Fleece and Fibre Festival in Coombs on May 26, I will be making blankets all summer.

I visited the Qualicum Bay Fibre Mill in early April and finished carding the white wool from last year.  The Romney/Cheviot mix is proving to be a wonderful fibre, lofty and strong and with little tendencies toward shrinkage or felting. It was so lofty I was catching it in the air as it flew out of the carder. 

I have also been knitting.  Influenced by the Cowichan knitters I have knit two jackets, one for each of my granddaughters.  The first which I knit for Naomi's 8th. birthday has a traditional whale motif borrowed from a Coast Salish pattern.  It turned out well but I do feel uncomfortable knitting traditional patterns as a none-native knitter, even though those patterns are now in the public domain. 

So I designed my own patterns of a hummingbird and of butterflies for Emily. 

As an expert knitter will see, I had some trouble with the butterflies and would add the extra stitches to the upper wings rather than the lower wings (see the top section).  The hummingbird worked out rather well.  I am currently drafting out the patterns for sale on my web-site and will make it available along with the yarns required.  This yarn knits up well and provides good definition for the motifs.  Unlike the single ply yarns used by Cowichan knitters, this is a three ply yarn spun in Carstairs, Alberta at the custom spinning mill and is not as heavy although the result is a great outer garment which could be lined with fleece for additional warmth.  

I used small bird motifs for the front of the jacket although I have designed a smaller hummingbird motif as a substitute.  I also prefer the collar design on this second jacket.

I used this same yarn in my weaving and produced a lovely weight of fabric suitable for blankets, cushion covers and upholstery fabric.  The picture below shows plain tabby weave on the loom but I was also able to produce some lovely chevron designs in various colours - something to discuss another day.

Plain weave on the loom.

For now I am off into the garden.  I had my windows cleaned today so now I can see those weeds and there are no excuses left not to get out there and do battle.

Moving On

Walter moved on to his new home last week.  He is just a few kilometers away and has a new harem of girls as well as a variety of other livestock to keep him company.  He is on Rock Farm along with the two male lambs we sent to be hand raised and bottle fed so he already has family there.  We shall miss him.  He was a good ram; not too aggressive and difficult to handle and always available for a good head scratch as you passed him by.

Meanwhile the lambs continue to grow and to thrive.  The weather has been fairly mild and so they have enjoyed the sunshine while learning the farm routines.  Dave goes out each day and gives them grain which is a real treat so they gather around him, affording an opportunity for him to inspect them and check for any injuries or problems.  They play hard and can often be seen limping along from some minor injury sustained while engaging in a game of king of the castle.

inspection time

Meanwhile, I have finished my first weaving samples and have been knitting.  I also went to Duncan to visit my women friends who Knit the Cowichan Sweaters.  I took a second indian head spinner with me that we mounted on an old treadle sewing machine base for Terry, one of the knitters to use.  The wool for the sweaters is all hand spun into a single ply, thick lopi weight yarn.  Terry makes spinning look so easy but I am having trouble getting the knack of it and can't keep the yarn even enough.  

Spinning looks easy

I am learning so much from these women and have knit a jacket for my granddaughter in the Cowichan style.  It is opening a whole new direction for my knitting and while I feel uncomfortable using the traditional Coat Salish patterns, I think it would be fun to design my own patterns reflective of our island life.  

So two things have moved on this week; first Walter and then the spinner.  Both have gone home.

Meanwhile, John just reminded me I have a  freezer full of strawberries and blackberries from last summer waiting to be made into jam.  So much to do; so little time.