What Housework?

Best day ever!

Okay, best FIBER day ever.

Halfway to the Green Mountain Spinnery, I realized I had forgotten my camera. Fortunately, when we got there, David (one of the owners) lent me the Spinnery's and then emailed me the pictures later. This would be great if I had been capable of focusing an auto-focus camera not familiar to me. It would also be great if I had photographed something other than machinery, such as, I don't know, PEOPLE. Because while the mill was very cool, the people were even cooler. I was so overcome with fiber I couldn't think straight.

The shop:

The storage room, full of fiber:

Jenn trying to abscond with a 500-pound bag of wool.

The mill process was more interesting in person than in pictures (esp. blurry ones), but we saw the scouring area, the picker, the carder (which cards once into a big sheet of fiber and then cards that fiber in a perpendicular way, to get a woolen yarn, into pencil roving), a long spinning machine, a steamer, and a big ol' skeiner.

Scouring. The process of washing the fiber is problematic because it wastes a lot of water. The Spinnery filters the water and reuses it several times. As for the leftover "sludge," they are looking into ways to use the by-product, such as by extracting the lanolin to be used in salves. I think David said they're hoping to eventually have the scouring done off-site but I could be wrong about that.

Picker:

Carder, first pass:

Pencil roving:

Spinning machine:
 

I don't have pictures of the spinning in process, but at the end of our trip we did catch a woman named Patty, simultaneously supervising all those bobbins up there while knitting (crocheting?) up some little Easter eggs. Must suck to work there.

Coffee and yarn (and patterns). It's all good.

The final word: Warm, friendly people treated us like we were the first ones to ever tour the mill; dropped everything to talk yarn and fiber; and allowed us to fill the small shop area completely with bags of fleece. Then customers, people with car troubles, and even pattern designers* started showing up to climb over the bags. It looked a little like this:

*A woman showed up with the back of a sort-of cabled baby sweater in a natural yarn, which turns out was GMS's organic yarn. The pattern is going into their next book. And the woman was "Melissa," who, it turns out, designed lots of projects in the Green Mountain Spinnery pattern book. How cool is that?

Jenn (knitting only since December '07 and cranking out the FOs) had to breathe into a paper bag after looking at all the patterns and feeling all the yarn in the shop. She fell victim to the Mountain Mohair and is almost done with her hat already:

Now I can't even remember what we settled on for Real Vermonter yarn, but it's going to be either a DK or sport weight 2-ply (wool/alpaca), and I'm having them use the non-petroleum spinning oil on it. It will be ready in May or June.

I'm telling you, if you are anywhere near southern Vermont, make plans to visit the Spinnery, even if you don't have time for a tour. It's worth it just to meet people who are actually interested in the same things you are, who talk the talk (only better than you becaues they're pros), and who don't think it's weird that you like sniffing wool.

Speaking of wool....

I have this idea I mentioned in my last post, and I gave it a try. A few weeks ago, a friend sold me this Romney hoggett fleece, some of which I scoured

and then picked, and then carded into batts:

Well, last week, I dyed the batts:

Then I quartered the dyed sections and ran them through the drum carder in this order, with no clear idea of what would happen:

Jenn took pictures of the progress:



And we got:

Actually, we got four of these 2-ounce batts.

Who wants four ounces' worth?

That's right, they're for sale. I am currently spinning four ounces myself and would be done plying if those people my family did not suck the life out of me need my attention every waking moment now and then:

Do you love it? If so, I'm asking $17 for four ounces plus shipping, and the first person to email me gets it. [SOLD] With any luck there will be more in the future, and soon I may be able to make it more efficiently because I GOT A LOAN for the business! Just a little one, but it's a start and will allow me to buy, in addition to lots of yarn, this, which will speed up the picking process by up to 10X.

For my next project, I'm thinking of white Romney blended with black alpaca and then overdyed. Ahhh. And if I can "cheat" a little, I might buy some non-Vermont silk and add that in. Are you swooning?

I don't have the time or energy to post all the Easter morning pictures. There was a hunt with clues that, when turned over, formed a puzzle, which led to a new bike.

Milo stalked the bike:

Do you ever get the feeling you're being watched?

And last, why we have a hard time getting dinner guests to come back:

Milo, in a deceptively loving mood:

Gothic Leaf is forgiven

We just needed some time apart. The last time we were together, I had discovered several mistakes that I couldn't overcome, so I tried dropping stitches down a few rows to do repairs. Bad idea. Finally, after ignoring all knitting for over a week, Saturday morning I ripped out 7 or 8 rows and resumed knitting. All is well. I now have 8 of 24 repeats done. While this won't be finished in time for the Boy's graduation next weekend, it's moving right along. Didn't do any gift knitting, however.

I've been trying to work in the gardens.

The big picture is still not looking so good, but there are small moments of flowery goodness here and there.

We've been spending a lot of time with the goats, of course. They like going on evening walks out to the pond.

Here, Trooper brings my husband a clod of dirt attached to the grass she is eating. Note the left hoof on his forearm:

And last, I thought I'd share my latest column, a timely piece on a Vermont spring favorite, rhubarb. When Sarah came to visit, I told her how the column (which I had just finished) was all about rhubarb and how everybody loves it, and she said, "Yeah, but it tastes like s**t."

Which is the exact point of the column.

RHUBARB
Copyright © 2007 Jessie Raymond

Last weekend, at my annual perennial swap, I offended quite a few people, and not just because I kept running out of coffee. I made a single off-the-cuff remark that turned a civilized crowd ugly.

One of the guests had brought a rhubarb plant to give away. Soon a dozen or so people were sharing stories of their rhubarb patches, the rhubarb crisp their great-aunt used to make, and how, when they were little, they’d pick and eat the stalks right in the yard. Rhubarb is an old standard, and you’ll find it, along with apple trees and lilac bushes, wherever you find an old farmhouse. Everybody loves rhubarb.

We were discussing various rhubarb crisp recipes and everyone was fine until, during an unfortunate lull in the conversation, I said: “Of course, nobody actually likes the taste of rhubarb.”

Conversation stopped. A few people looked away and pretended to be debating between the black-eyed susans or the purple coneflowers. A few diehard rhubarb fans, however, took a step toward me and brandished their trowels in a menacing fashion.

How dare I malign a fruit (well, a stalk, anyway) that had grown in grandmother’s garden for generations? That had supplied spring’s bounty in the form of rhubarb crisp on the screened-in porch since one’s childhood? That hid under its elephantine leaves a tart red stem with myriad uses, although admittedly no one ever did anything with it except make rhubarb crisp or rhubarb jelly (which no one eats but which looks delightful in gift baskets)?

I stood my ground.

I don’t deny that many of us have wonderful associations with rhubarb. I myself have, every spring, gaily marched out to the backyard rhubarb patch and cut a dozen or so stalks (approximately .02 percent of the available harvest) to make my annual rhubarb crisp. After slicing the stalks into bite-sized pieces and adding a generous amount of sugar, about 3 cups, the mouth-numbing sour flavor can be camouflaged to the point of palatability and can be used in any crisp recipe. Garnished with enough vanilla ice cream, the rhubarb is barely detectable and the resulting crisp delicious.

I think a lot of people secretly agree with me: Rhubarb is a favorite more for the memories it evokes than for its distinctive flavor. So who decided it was good to eat in the first place? I suspect two hundred years ago, people ate rhubarb mainly because of a dearth of other dessert choices at this time of year. Just as people ate roots and berries and bark when food was scarce, I imagine they gravitated toward rhubarb (whose giant leaves are poisonous, by the way) because apples weren’t in season and bananas don’t grow here.

Here’s an analogy. In the 1600s, the Pilgrims sailed across the Atlantic. For six weeks, they ate hardtack, which is a fancy name for stale rolls. I doubt whether, if glazed donuts were available at the time, Miles Standish would have been lying below decks at midnight thinking, “Mm, I could go for a nice lump of hardtack. And maybe a tankard of brackish water.”

Remember, back in those days people ate things like pease porridge. Hot, cold, nine days old, whatever. They probably only had one pot, and if there was pease porridge in it, that was dinner until the pot was empty. With the introduction of refrigeration, Tupperware and Hamburger Helper, the popularity of well-aged pease porridge dropped off sharply.

And yet rhubarb endures.

Despite my conviction that rhubarb’s status is more about nostalgia than about taste, I feel bad about my comment at the perennial swap. As an apology, I’m extending an invitation to anyone who took offense: How about dinner at my house this Saturday?

I have some pease porridge that’s been sitting out since a week ago Thursday, so it should be ripe by the weekend. And I’ve got some hardtack desiccating in the pantry. Naturally, as a peace offering, I’ll whip up a nice rhubarb crisp.

If you could just bring a few gallons of vanilla ice cream, we’ll be all set.

"Honey, where's the mayonnaise?"

The photo is to remind you that there is knitting content, below. But first, a recent column of mine, concerning the serious male medical condition, GBB:

Of the many medical breakthroughs in recent years, there is one that women everywhere have been praying for: a cure for Gender-Based Blindness. Finally, there is hope.

GBB is a chronic condition that affects only men, rendering them virtually incapable finding things. If you live with a man, bless your heart, no doubt you see evidence of GBB on a daily basis. This disease affects otherwise healthy men, who, when in need of a new bar of soap, for instance, cannot find it without a woman’s help.

You know how it goes: Although you have kept bathroom supplies in the same linen closet for close to 30 years, your husband will never look in it. Even after you instruct him to look in the linen closet, on the third shelf, he’ll scan the contents for several minutes with no luck.

You will have to come up to the bathroom and move a shampoo bottle four inches to the left, thereby revealing a Costco-size case of Irish Spring. Your husband will be dumbfounded and say, well, he could have found it himself if only you had told him it was behind something else.

The inability to look behind things is a primary characteristic of GBB, and it explains why a significant portion of GBB sufferers have trouble with the refrigerator. While a woman may see the fridge as a finite space in which anything can be located in a matter of moments, a man tends to see it as a portal through which perishable foods can be sucked into other dimensions.

Say you ask your husband to get a gallon of milk from the fridge. He can do this only if the milk is at eye-level and in the front row. If, by some unfortunate circumstance, his view of the milk jug is obscured by an object—such as a stick of butter—your husband will simply conclude that the milk does not exist.

Rather than move things around, the better to see behind them, he’ll stand upright with hands on hips, like a would-be Superman waiting for his x-ray vision to kick in. When beams fail to shoot out of his eyes and make the butter transparent, you’ll have to come to his rescue.

The moment you move the butter to another shelf, the milk jug will magically rematerialize. In the defensive tone typical of GBB-positive males, he will whine, “How was I supposed to know it was back there?” (As a noteworthy aside, military analysts are now saying that, had weapons inspectors thought to look behind the butter in Iraqi refrigerators, WMDs would have been discovered during the first round of inspections.)

Gender-Based Blindness has existed for thousands of years, although scientists are just now beginning to understand its impact on our society’s development. Think of how much sooner, for example, the Northwest Passage would have been discovered had a woman led the expedition. As it is, without Sacagawea, Lewis and Clark probably would have given up when they hit the first line of pine trees: “Nope. Let’s head back.”

Researchers’ first step in finding a cure for GBB was differentiating it from other forms of typical male behavior. For example, when a man steps over a pile of cat barf on the rug and insists he didn’t see it, that’s not GBB. Scientists label this kind of conduct as “just plain lazy.”.

Fortunately, while there may be no cure for laziness, there is hope for true GBB. One major pharmaceutical company has developed a pill (under the name “Eureka”) that, when taken daily, significantly improves a man’s ability to find objects, even those not in plain sight. In clinical trials, 89 percent of patients taking Eureka for 8 weeks were able to independently find a new roll of toilet paper under the sink even when it was tucked behind a row of cleaning products. (Sadly, only 5 percent of the same men were able to put the new roll on the spindle, but scientists say they are making strides in that area and hope to have a cure by 2020.)

While regular use of Eureka has been proven highly effective, researchers still must overcome the primary hurdle to the drug’s success: The majority of test subjects can’t find the bottle in the medicine cabinet.

© 2007 by Jessie Raymond

Back to knitting. Before leaving for the weekend, I posted that I planned on starting my Holiday Headstart knitting. The plan was to find a suitable yarn in a suitable color for a suitable pattern for a certain person. That's a lot of variables. I found the pattern and the color for the person, but not the yarn. So I started over. A few times.

Eventually I realized that there was a good supply of yarn staring me in the face: my own yarns from A Piece of Vermont. I also realized that although I have been selling Real Vermonter sock yarn (Made with local wool and mohair! Act now! Operators are standing by!), I have yet to actually knit anything with this stuff. What kind of entrepreneur am I?

I dug out my size 1 needles (realizing as I looked at them that this is, perhaps, why I don't knit a lot of socks) and cast on 68 stitches (!) for the Classy Slip-Up socks from the Knit Socks! book by Betsy Lee McCarthy.

And I learned that this yarn is really awesome!

I had it spun as a 3-ply for extra durability. I planned on a 50/50 wool/mohair mix, but a slip-up (ha ha) at the mill resulted in a 30/70 mohair blend. This seemed to take away from the elasticity of the yarn, but knitted up, it resulted in a very soft, glowing, fuzzy, stretchy fabric.

You can't feel the softness, but can you see the halo?

The problem is that it will probably take me 6 months or so to knit this one pair of socks, provided it's my only project going. And now I want some for myself. So that will take the other 6 months of the year, and my holiday headstart (goal: 12 gifts over 12 months) will fall approximately 11 projects short. Maybe I should take on the Holiday Headstart plan for 2015.

It's a tough time of year for bookkeepers of their husbands' businesses and I've been up to my eyeballs in 941s, 940s, W-2s, 1099s, not to mention quarterly state thingies. That, and a column deadline, have meant very little fiber or Piece of Vermont progress for the first half of this week. But I'm heading out to the temporary dye studio right after I post this, and hopefully I'll be back on track soon enough.

One of the things I'll be working on this week (besides Teyani's sweater yarn--eep) is dyeing up more superwash merino worsted. You can see what it looks like knitted up at Margene's blog, as well as at Knits with a Silent K, a new blog by Kim, who used it for the charity Red Scarf project as often seen on Norma's blog.

Is that enough links? (Better to drop names than stitches.)

The boy came in 3rd at the last tournament (now about 32-2 for the season, I estimate), which was a disappointment but not a crushing blow. I leave you with my daughter and husband on the mats during a break. He is chewing on her toes.