A sheep farmer in Wiltshire left a message for me here, and when I contacted her privately, she gave me a bit more info about the sheep she raises. I hope we can continue our correspondence because I would love to know more specifics about her own sheep and the situation in the UK in general. It made my day be able to contact her!

The sheep on Margaret’s farm are related to the Wiltshire Horn breed which she told me are natural shedders. Her flock have been crossed now to shed more so that they don’t need to be sheared.

This is such a revelation to me. The earliest sheep were shedders. Women learned to spin wool by collecting the bits of discarded wool that might cling to things where the sheep had grazed. Fast forward many, many millennia to a time still in the distant past, where humans have been breeding sheep NOT to shed, to have many different kinds of fibers to be used by humans for many different products. Now look where we’ve gone–back to wanting sheep that lose their fleeces naturally. Margaret said that shearing her flock would cost three times what the fleece would bring at market. She also said that the cross she raises has coarse fibers which work well in the climate of Wiltshire. That surprised me. I can’t imagine a climate much worse than the remote islands off the coast of Scotland, where those sheep (Shetland and Ronaldsay come to mind) have wonderfully soft fibers for cold weather. There’s a lot to this that I clearly don’t understand. Margaret also told me that this fall has been exceptionally wet in her part of the world–cold and wet. Her sheep need their coarse coats in order to stay dry and warm. I am fascinated by this. If I learn more I’ll share it.

Meanwhile, if you want to read a bit about this history of Wiltshire Horn sheep, you can look here. I didn’t see anything about shearing vs. shedding there, but I intend to keep searching. I found that I could buy a little Wiltshire Horn stuffed sheep here. Tempting.

Meanwhile, my weaving feels like it is moving at a snail’s pace. On the bright side, just a few minutes ago I finally cut off 6 yards of cotton and linen blend fabric that is going to become six towels. The woven structure is in Carol Strickler’s A Weaver’s Book of Eight-Shaft Patterns. It’s #314. I used Jane Stafford’s cotton boucle for the warp and much of the weft. By the time I was truly bored with weaving, and my color options of the cotton boucle were dwindling, I switched to weaving with Gist’s cotton/linen called “Duet.” Maybe I was just so bored with the boucle, but the Duet cotton/linen seems a better look to me. I will keep that towel for myself. I don’t really know why I wove all of these! I don’t know anyone who has a kitchen that calls for out the colors I chose.

I was deeply in need of weaving when I returned home from a long winter away, locked down for months in foreign countries and feeling very much an outsider–an outsider not wanted due to the fear of pandemic we might bring to the small islands we visit each year on our sailboat. When I got home I couldn’t wait to just mindlessly sit at my small loom and weave. I wove off the napkin warp that did not get finished before leaving on the long voyage last November. Then I wove two linen warps dyed with indigo for waffle weave face cloths. Then came the warp for nine (yikes! nine!) kitchen towels with JST cotton boucle. Who will want these somewhat odd colored towels? I’ll keep two, but that leaves another four! Ah well, I needed to make them for sanity, for therapy. Now I can move on.

Next on my list is a variation of the popular turned taquete circles that Sue Poague developed and showcased in Handwoven in one of the issues from 2019. I actually bought a set of placemats from her because I was so intrigued with this weave structure and yet would not be home to weave any for myself. They cheered me up every night at dinner on our boat while we were in far away places. Back home I wanted to plan a blanket for my older granddaughter in this structure, but I wanted the circles to be bigger. I have a larger loom with 16 shafts, so I started trying to expand the pattern to more harnesses. I think I have it sorted and hope to start winding the warp soon. I’ll share the pattern when I can determine that it weaves well. I’ve bought a large selection of 6/2 cotton in eight colors so the threads will be thicker for blanket weight. I’m excited to get started! I have spent more time than I care to admit on color arrangement. I have seven colors for the circles, and the background warp and all the weft will be a medium grey. I need 19 color stripes across my warp and I’m having a devil of time arranging them in what I hope will be a pleasing order. Ugh! Isn’t it the smallest details that cause the greatest delays? I’ve taken multiple photos on my phone of color arrangements, and then I’ve edited those photos to be black and white so I can assess the values of the circles going across the warp. I’m not happy yet.

Looks like summer, right? I now use these when eat outside at home. Well, I hope my blanket will look as pretty as these placemats. I’d better get to making that warp!

Dear Reader, are you a knitter? Were you shocked when you learned that the most creative knitter of all time, Cat Bordhi, passed away in September? I did not know she had been living with cancer for some time. I did not know that she was 69. She’s the most youthful 69 year old I’ve ever seen, and I think that must be because of her inquisitive nature, her drive to find new ways to achieve results in knitting. Her creativity makes my brain hurt, but I’m always so happy and intrigued to try her techniques.

Recently, I got another shock from the knitting world. Annie Modesitt also passed away, on October 1. I knew she’d been dealing with overwhelming health issues for many years, both her own as well as her husband’s. Two knitters of such immense creativity are gone.

This year has been stressful for everyone between the pandemic, the world political situation, advancing climate change issues, and our own presidential election. My best stress reliever is always doing something textile-related, having thread or yarn in my hands–weaving, knitting, embroidery. That’s the main reason I wove two sets of waffle weave face cloths, and now have a set of eight kitchen towels on my small loom. On Monday I saw Amy Singer’s tweet about having a knit along to relieve our election anxieties. She offered a choice of three knit designs or mentioned that any of us could just knit something, anything, together. And that’s when I knew I had to knit at least two of Cat’s ‘anemone hats.’ The first two would be for my granddaughters, Tori and Emme. Maybe I can even knit one for Rhett without the moebius brim. Outrageously cute, right?

I ordered lots of yarn for these hats because I also want to knit two adult hats, even though I have no particular recipients in mind.

The yarns I’ve ordered so far are from Lorna’s Laces, called “Shepherd Worsted.” The yarn for the adult hat, pictured on the left, is a color called “black pearl.” It will be hard to give that hat to anyone but me! Can you see the little amethyst stitch markers on the needles? They are from Twice Sheared Sheep, my favorite source of stitch markers and row counters. They came in the adorable tin on the right side of the photo. I have a couple colorways of Malabrigo yarn waiting in a shopping cart for a few more hats.

So knitting has been my ‘go-to’ for a good deal of each day this week. Most of the reason for that is there is a mistake on the kitchen towels I’m weaving! It’s a weaving mistake, so all I should have had to do is UNweave by treadling the sequence backwards. But life can be full of limiting conditions, and here are mine:

–My Baby Wolf has the combby dobby head attachment, and the reverse button does not work, and supposedly cannot be fixed.

–I use Fiberworks PCW, and I should be able to ask the program to weave in reverse, but I haven’t had luck with that. So I have looked for the place in the pattern where I can weave forward and yet be UNweaving what I did. I am using an Ms & Ws pattern (Strickler 314.5) that reverses, so as long as I’m weaving forward in the part of the pattern that is the reverse of my problem area, this should work. And it does work. I’ve now UNwoven twice without a hitch. It’s when I begin to go forward again, finding the place that goes forward from where I left off, that hasn’t worked.

After two reversals and two botched forward attempts, I walked away from the loom in a snit. That was about 2 weeks ago now. With all the other anxiety-producing stuff going on, I was not in a good place for tackling this. I think I’ve recovered sufficiently, mostly from knitting all those squiggly anemones, to tackle this again. I’m headed to the loom shortly. Wish me luck!

I must share a perk from this week of stress. A friend gave me a big treasure box of antique and vintage linens. Oh my, oh my! I’ve been swooning over the contents for two days now. I’ve dealt with the stains that mostly came from years (and decades) of being stored on wooden shelves that allowed tannins to migrate into the linen. So I have soaked some of the items in Oxyclean and then washed them in the machine. There are tablecloths and napkins, large linen bath towels, handmade bobbin lace edgings on doilies, and even linen bedsheets embroidered in pulled thread designs with satin stitch monograms. Three of the bedsheets are a stunning peachy-pink. I feel weak every time I look at these treasures!

This looks like Portuguese embroidery to me. Want to weigh in? — please get in touch! I have two of these tablecloths, and 12 coordinating napkins. One cloth is sized for a small table (72″), and the other is probably good for sitting 10 or 12, at 120″. I hope I get to try the large tablecloth someday. I wonder if we will ever have large dinner parties, or holiday dinners in the future. I hope so!

There are eight of these beautiful placemats. They have no stains, so all I had to do was iron them.

There are three of these large linen bath towels. There are tannin stains on at the folds. I have soaked them in a mild solution of Oxyclean and warm water overnight, and then run them through the normal machine cycle on warm wash, cold rinse. They are significantly better, but not yet perfect. Maybe ‘perfect’ is not attainable; maybe that’s okay.

Keeping my hands busy is definitely helping this week, especially learning the wonderful moebius cast on, knitting, and binding off, of Cat Bordhi’s fun anemone hat. I hope your hands are busy too! — in a good way.

The last time I wrote something here it was late spring, and now it’s early autumn. Where did the summer go? Have you felt the pressure of these past few months? The strain on our lives due to fires in the West, floods in the upper midwest, hurricanes along the Gulf Coast. Along with the pandemic it feels like we are living through an apocalypse. I did not add in the political strife, but I certainly feel it. I wrote this post in early October, and now we are just days from the end of yet another month. It’s now mid-autumn, no longer early.

I’ve been spinning my wheels all summer and not managing to verbalize any of it. Ideas and plans are swirling around my head, but not much seems to come of all my deliberating. Some of this dilemma is literal. I have done a lot of spinning. What a calming activity, especially when I listen to audio books while doing it. I expected that a bit of yarn spinning would help the thoughts spinning in my head, but it hasn’t worked that way. I have a large stash of silk tops, and this summer I managed to start turning them into yarn….yarn that might become yardage, someday…..yardage that might become a garment of some kind. All of this is completely nebulous. That feels appropriate since right now nothing in my life feels defined, or planned, or like anything I might count on to happen or become.

Today (meaning back in early October) I spoke with a friend who produces a news program on one of the major radio stations. I told her I was ‘reeling’ from the news over the past week. She laughed and said we should all be reeling–reeling our yarn onto niddy noddies, onto spools, onto anything at hand. So true.

And my own weaving? Right now I cannot make myself look at the tapestry diary I started while we were living in the Caribbean over the winter and spring. It is too raw and too fresh. Of course I am berating myself that it is a diary of this year, and this year will soon be finished while the tapestry will not. At the moment, with everything else going on, I just don’t want to dwell on the experiences of this year. Who knows where that will lead. In the meantime, I’ve woven a couple of fabric projects on my smaller loom, the Baby Wolf. I finished the set of napkins that were waiting for me on my return. They are pinned for hand sewing the mitered hems, but as of right now I’ve only actually hemmed one of the four. There are six in the set. I gave the first two at Christmas with the promise that the rest of them would be done before the next Christmas arrives. I’d better get on with the hemming.

I wove two sets of waffle weave face cloths (for a total of 10), based on two I bought from Are Clothes Modern weaver Arianna Funk. Her face cloths are done in Swedish 5S waffle weave, with hand dyed indigo warps that a friend of hers dyed for her. I was lucky to find two colorways of indigo dyed linen from Claudia Hand Painted Yarns this summer. One is very pale and the other quite dark. I wove the pale indigo warp in 8S waffle weave. I love them! I thought I might tie on the dark indigo warp to weave the same structure, but in the end I decided to warp and rethread for a 6S waffle weave.

I can’t decide which project I like best. The face cloths are such simple things. Hardly worth the effort perhaps, but again, they were so therapeutic to weave. I enjoyed thinking about who might get these little gifts, and what I might include with this gift, like local handmade soap or one of L’Occitane’s lavender soaps from Provence. Weaving them was a time of escaping the current stress of the world and doing something profoundly simple but caring. Self care, if nothing else.

Here are some of the light ones, ready for giving. I saved one for myself, which is why there are only four in the image.

I could not capture the true blue of the darker indigo face cloths.

This is the closest I got to showing the color of the dark indigo skeins.

Much of the summer I enjoyed gardening and bringing cut flowers into the house. Bob and I visited our older son and his family a few times. He lives in a state that is as low in Covid cases as Connecticut, and both our families are not seeing anyone at this time, so we made a bubble together. They surprised me with a half birthday celebration since my real one falls in January when we are in the Caribbean. The twins turned two as I had a ‘half birthday.’ It’s impossible to get a photo of all three grandchildren together. They are like billiard balls released from the triangle!

The garden off my studio in June, when the clematis and astilbe were looking lovely.

One of our front window boxes in midsummer.

The garlic chives in late August.

There is a glorious finale to the gardening season this year. We’ll have a frost later this week that will end the morning glories, but not the monkshood.

A silver lining to being somewhat locked down at home is that there are fiber festivals that I would normally never get to visit until this year, when many of them went virtual. I took a virtual visit to Edinburgh in September for Scotland Cloth #20. It was well done, with the ability to visit the virtual booths of the artisans, watch videos that some of the fine crafts people had prepared, even choose music to accompany one’s tour of the festival. I’ve had a desire to buy something from Bonny Claith (aka weaver Cally Booker), and this was my chance. Now that it’s a bit colder, I’ve been enjoying my new cowl, sent all the way from Scotland! It’s a great accessory for my ancient Elsbeth Lavold designed cable sweater (Siv). And note my new do. After 10 months with no haircut my hair came down to the middle of my back. It was not youthful! I had become one of those stereotypes of a weaver with long gray hair. All I needed to complete the look was Birkenstock’s and cats.

Now that we are well into autumn, I find that I am no more focused or settled than I was in mid-summer. I am still spinning that silk stash. I’ve finished the face cloths and moved onto another ‘homey’ project of a long warp for eight kitchen towels. Kitchen towels? Truly, I am craving some simple luxuries. I got out my warp trapeze that Bob built for a much larger loom. It works quite well on my small Baby Wolf, and warping was a walk in the park!

I will have eight variations on the towels. This is the first towel, and I’m currently on the fourth.

Yet I find that I am still in a muddle, with so many ideas and plans, and no clear path to prioritize what I want to do. I just want to do everything while also enjoying what little socializing I am able to do within our small bubble. Last week I was still pining for the wonderful hand dyed indigo linen I used in the face cloths. I decided to plan a project for an undetermined top using linen from my stash. Here’s what I found in the stash.

As you can see, the linen is quite old. The front two spools are the same dye lot, but the other two are not. It will make a nice mixed warp when these subtle natural colors are dyed with indigo. Fingers crossed.

I feel so disconnected from people these days– my weaving friends, lace friends, old friends and new. I hope you are well, and that there are things in life that give you joy, make you want to get up in the morning to spin your own wheels, real or otherwise. And I hope there are gifts in your life, both received and given. Enjoy the season and please stay well.

It’s great to be home again, in spite of these very stressful times: a once-in-a-100-year pandemic…oh!…and political turmoil that feels like the start of civil war. I have found, amidst the strife and worry, that I can find solace in simple things. Every day I make a promise to myself to do something, any small thing, that will just feel good.

Who can predict what can change an attitude? Yesterday I was so stirred up with anxiety and disappointment, I picked up a small cross stitch pattern that I bought years ago. I haven’t given this a thought since about a week after buying it on impulse. It came into my line of sight yesterday because I was looking for something else. Without conscious thought I simply brought it up to my ‘nest’ chair in the den and began to stitch the little sheep. It’s actually a Christmas design. It’s June. I have no idea what I would ever do with this little sheep….but it feels good right now. I’m going to stick with it based on just that: it feels good.

I’ve been thinking about Sarah Swett’s paper yarn that she spins from used coffee filters. One of her friends dyed some of the filters with indigo and cochineal. Then Sarah dyed some herself. Hmmm. I have a big collection of onion skins, and I have madder. Oranges, reds, golds. What a comforting way to spend time. I’ve enjoyed just washing my filter each morning and draping it to dry over the kitchen faucet. I’ve starting cutting a few in prep for the spinning. It’s mindless work that requires some attention to detail to make the concentric cuts even. A perfect feel-good activity.

Digging in the dirt feels good right now too. Some things are bursting into bloom in my garden; some things are still just seeds in pots waiting to sprout. My lettuce is in between. Right now I’m happy to watch it grow.

The whole gamut of garden life feels encouraging right now, and I need that. I’m keeping track of the types of birds at our feeders (4 different varieties of woodpeckers, goldfinches, wrens and house finches, a red breasted grosbeak! Where are the Baltimore orioles this year?) There are wrens and house finches nesting in multiple places, near doors that we now have to avoid in order not to disrupt their important task of making and raising a family. We have droves of hummingbirds nesting in the trees near our back deck. They are at war with each other for domination of the feeders we have hanging from the deck. Nature has no idea what evil lurks in men’s hearts. The garden is a great place to escape!

What are you doing for solace these days? I hope it feels good and renews your equilibrium. Is this the new normal? It’s not all bad, especially if we can each spend a bit more time doing simple things that spark joy.

I have four napkins to hem for Melody and Chris, a very simple task. Thread and needle and probably a couple of hours of attention to the detail of making small , even stitches around a piece of handwoven cloth. I feel quite lucky to have such a task before me.

Time to get to it.