I Cherish the Sheep

I Cherish the Sheep

They say every spinner eventually gets curious about other fibers than wool. 

With me, it turns out the other way around.

First, I try various other animal and plant fibers:

The neighbor’s mountaineering pack llama fleece. 

My friend’s prize winning alpaca fleece. 

The guard llama, Blue, down the road from us, who ferociously watches over his own little sheep flock.  

The family dog.

The pet angora rabbit.

The angora goats we had for a while, before they tried to eat all of the native flowers on the land, and we gave them to another sanctuary farm, run by a friends who had a lot of invasive plants to for them to gleefully chew through. 

The cashmere goats we babysat, for a friend, for a few months.

Exotic animals; yak, camel, etc.

Flax.

Organic natural colored cotton.

Rayon. 

Hemp.

Silk. Then raw silk, in which no harm is done to the silkworms. The abandoned cocoons are gathered, picked from the mulberry trees, actually. We even tried to grow some mulberry trees!

This is probably my weirdest fiber collection: It is all of the whiskers that my vegan cat (not his choice I admit) has shed onto the floor, which I have gathered, while vacuuming, over these last several years. 

It is only after trying almost every other fiber I could find, that I take a real interest in the most common natural fiber in the world, wool; rivaled only by silk and of course, cotton.

(Cotton is really the best fiber, when it is grown sustainably and with nontoxic and regenerative methods. The humble tee shirt, and blue jeans, are truly the apex of our civilization, in terms of fiber accomplishments. This is what the royalty of yesteryear would have worn, if they had had it. It is indeed what you see the corporate royalty of today wearing! 

(What Would Jesus Wear?):

But the bulk of these tee shirts and blue jeans are today still being made with pesticide laden, land degrading, water wasting, labor exploiting, fossil fuel polluting technologies. We soon really must do it right, because we can. All we have to do is want to. If we valued our beautiful textiles as our ancestors did, we would take care of them and not lay waste to the planet in their production.)

But I digress. Cotton is really hard to spin by hand, and it makes a dust I do not care to breathe when I try to do so. Silk is usually made by killing the silkworms to make the processing easier and make more profit. So silk has lost its shine for me.

So, slowly, I discover sheep wool. Of course, wool too, today is mostly from unethical and exploitative “big ag” operations, so called farms. There is even a breed of sheep they call a “Polypay”: it is bred to kill for meat AND to then use for wool! Overcrowded sheep are “dipped” in pesticides to keep them from being infested by parasitic insects. They roll across overused lands disrupting and mowing down native plant systems. As with silk, and cotton, we are doing a very bad job with the way we get wool, in general.

But I do find a few sources of what I consider ethical wool for handspinning. There are conservation and heritage breeds and programs. 

This yarn is spun from a threatened heritage breed that has learned to thrive on seaweed on a sparsely vegetated island north of the British isles:

Here are some yarns from another heritage breed farm:

There are neighbors and farms that advertise the way they care for their sheep. (See quote at the end)

We could certainly do this on a wider scale. All we would have to do is, again, want to. It is like organically grown food, if people want to value it, and pay the true cost of the product instead of in effect stealing it from the commons in the form of a pollution debt passed on to the future, we can do it right. 

We do already know how. We could then truly take care of our textiles instead of throwing them away and having them hit the landfill within a year of purchase, as is the case today.

Done right, wool is second only to cotton as a wonderful and ideal fiber. I have fallen in love with sheep, and wool. Sheep wool is really fun to spin. It has a crimp and a bounce. It moisturizes your skin with its natural lanolin oils as you spin. Knitted, it makes a natural elastic. 

 Wool can keep us warm, and shed water. It can hold up to a fourth of its weight in water and still feel warm. It is strong and durable, coming in fiber sizes from tough as needed for a rug, to soft as you would want to use next to a baby’s skin. It comes in a wide range of naturally occurring colors, and takes dye well. The dye need not be a toxic type, and low water dye processes are being pioneered in places like Southern California.

Do not be dazzled by the fancy fibers made of plastic cheapness being cooked up in chemical factories today. Unlike the various fibers made from petroleum industry byproducts, natural fibers completely degrade. Plastic fiber derived cloth just breaks down into ever smaller pieces, and these microscopic bits are now found in air and water everywhere on our planet. Each bit attracts and binds preferentially with pesticides and other toxic chemicals. Once released, these poison bits are all but impossible to remove or reclaim, and are now building up in the food chain, and in the bodies of people and animals worldwide. 

So I buy organically grown clothing, and do my best to use ethical sourced natural fibers in my spinning, knitting, weaving, and art. And I try to take good care of my textiles. 

But individual actions are only a start. While providing personal demonstrations of sustainable alternative ways as object lessons, we also urgently need to convert all of our production systems to sustainable, “cradle to cradle”regenerative methods, by means of fair regulation, figuring in true cost, so harmful methods can no longer out-compete ethical methods.

“We mostly have sheep with a few alpacas, horses, peacocks, geese etc. Any animal here is here for life. We just all do the best we can. I decided years ago that I couldn't save all the animals but I could save my own so that is my focus.” - the farmer from whom I get most of my spinning wool

Homeopathic Dye Experiment

Homeopathic Dye Experiment

I am playing with colors again. I take a pinch of dye and dissolve it in a quarter cup of water. I pour half in a tiny little jar in the crockpot with a bit of fleece. 

I’m working with merino staples and a few stunning  teeswater twelve inch long curly locks I just got. 

With half of my dye left, I stir water in the mixing pitcher back to the same quarter cup level. Half of this goes into the next little jar. The third jar gets half as much as the previous one, and so on, until jar number six, which is so diluted that the water barely shows any color at all!

The orange dye at full strength turns the fleece almost red, but is quite yellow at the end, at the last dilution.

Turquoise is lovely and deep at the first jar, but a pale minty green at the end of the line.

Pink just keeps getting paler…

“All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson

Leafing Through Fall Colors

"How beautiful the leaves grow old. How full of light and color are their last days.” 

-W Burroughs 

Once again I fall for autumn colors, as we leaf through the pages of poetry the trees drop all around us. Tales of heat, and sun, wind, and even rain. The leaves of the tree books crunch underfoot, scattered, free for all to read, no longer fastened in the branches and twigs where they were composed. Some fly gently down, and then fly again, as a passing breeze rustles them into songs, and lifts, sorts, and shuffles the stories.

“Autumn leaves don’t fall, they fly.” -Delia Owens

I am doing some stash busting fiber projects at the moment, with alpaca.

One is a rug that I make with all sorts of bits of leftover alpaca hand spun yarn, eight plying them together into mega yarn, and weaving the rug on a peg loom.

This year it is the dull brown oak leaves that call me. The ones with round edges, especially.

Many of the native oak groves here have been replaced with houses, farms, and roads, but a few can still be found here and there. This one is in a park that was once a ranch in the early days of this town, donated by a civic minded family, and now completely surrounded with city. 

It is the only spot I know of in my daily hikes where you can find a colony of acorn woodpeckers, sort of clownish looking birds, who nest in group apartments in the snags scattered about in this oak grove.

Next, I dig out a bag of naturally colored alpaca fleece that is such a warm brown that it is almost red. But the staple is very short, and difficult to spin. So I decide to felt. It is raining hard now, breaking the long drought of many months, at least for the moment. But it is not really cold, so I imagine a felt rain poncho. 

Such a large project can be made more easily if you felt it in smaller pieces, since felt severely shrinks the area of any surface you want to make. I felt each piece in two thin layers, resulting in six panels; sewing them all together at the end. Then I add some locks to the edges here and there, for decoration. 

Then the oak leaves speak to me. I gather a few different sizes and bring them home, tracing around them to needle felt each one to the poncho.

The result is a surprisingly lightweight but cozy poncho. 

Free Stuff

Free Stuff

I like free stuff. I like the idea of free stuff, anyway. Most everyone responds to an offer of free, or they are at least willing to take a look. Probably the most eye catching word in advertising is “free”.

After a while too much stuff of any sort gets to be too much stuff, however, then you need space. Space for your stuff. Then you can set your stuff free, and someone else maybe will get some free stuff from you. I like the idea of the free box, Buy Nothing Day, and groups that circulate stuff to help people to share stuff they no longer want. 

There is something compelling and deep about getting free stuff. The free breakfast picked on your morning walk of blackberries that grow by the path. The free taste sample at the food booth. That chair left out by the side of the road that is just right for the kitchen table if you just tighten a screw. (Maybe I can paint flowers all over it. If I don’t like how it comes out, I can just give it away.)

I even love the beauty of the colorful leaf in the fall that I find on the ground, or that pebble or stone. A shaman would say if you impulsively pick up that particular rock you find on your path, it is, for you, a power rock. 

Today’s haul of free stuff from my morning walk includes a special, beautiful acorn. Perhaps it will sit in my house, being beautiful, for a while, then maybe I will plant it somewhere. There are a few little oak trees around here that I probably planted; they have sprung up with no oak trees nearby. 

There is also a little eye I picked up, the clear plastic kind with a black disk that rolls around when you shake it. It is dented from having been stepped on. Probably fell off of some toy. There is another eye like that on the dashboard of my car now as well. They remind me to keep my eyes on the road. 

Many artists have been inspired by free stuff, even trash. There is a challenge in trying to turn ugliness into beauty; colorful bits of plastic are ugly by the roadside; but assembled into art, say, a plastic rainbow, they have a new incarnation. Some people do find this beautiful. 

But there is a dark side. At the risk of sounding an old cliche, there is no free stuff. Chasing after free stuff is self destructive and wasteful of our time, energy, our planet, and each other.

Maybe plastic garbage art is a way of raising awareness about all the stuff we throw away, like that plastic; it never really goes away. Indeed, art can be sad, poignant. Or maybe it is a tacky way to justify all this disposable stuff we make. I know some people want art made from the finest wood, or precious gems from deep in the earth, or made of pure gold. This is considered good taste. But is it? Maybe this sort of art is tackiest of all, since it makes the world uglier with deforestation and gratuitous mining.

We have, as a species, been loving free stuff for a very long time. At this point, we have efficiently harvested most of the resources of the planet, imperiling ourselves, most other creatures and life forms, and the future of our civilization. Something is wrong. Maybe all this stuff we have been enthusiastically helping ourselves to, is not so free after all. Our hunting and gathering instinct has gone awry. 

I see this attitude twisting people in personal weird directions too. Compulsive shoppers sit amid piles of unopened packages previously ordered, while they shop, order, hunt and gather more. Hoarders stuff their houses with, well, what anyone else can see, is trash. Sweet loving people stuff their bellies with food that is bad for them, simply because it is free, or so cheaply made or sourced, that it is almost free. Then, when they inevitably get sick from such self abuse, they swallow toxic so called medicine, simply because it is what their medical so called “plan” pays for. It is “free”: There is no co-pay. Or is there?  Soon they are freed of their body!

Contorting ourselves in ways we would not choose if we were to really think about what we actually want, we compulsively obey the rule to always go for the free stuff, or the cheapest stuff, erroneously assuming that in so doing, we are saving up some virtual bank account of abundance in the future. But what if the exact opposite is the case? 

Buy Everything 

Maybe we could reframe the acquisition of stuff. Consider everything to be a purchase: we buy it with our precious time, energy, attention, and yes, our imaginary cultural creation, money. You may think you have insufficient stores of some of these; most people do think that, but that is another whole essay for another day. You do have some, now, at hand, at least. 

So what is the best way to spend these precious resources in your power here and now? What will you purchase with this day of time, this hour of energy, this moment of attention? And who is being fooled when you hunt down and buy karma laden toxic food and gather cheap crap? Is it really free, or borrowed from the health of all of us? Is it not stolen goods purchased from thieves?

All spending is actually giving. So it comes back to you multiplied. What is the karma you purchase with your gift? Is it a better world, or a debt of damage to repair?

The shaman would tell us that nothing is free, for every action carries karmic consequences. She would say we must ask permission for every flower picked, even to take the fallen leaf; and we also must give thanks for each and every thing we take. Even photographs.

We have taken abundance and turned it into scarcity: we have hunted and gathered, exploited and mined, burned and harvested our way toward oblivion and desolation, just by following our instinctive impulse to get some more free stuff. 

Why?! And what to do instead? First, we need to expand the definition of ourselves. If we hunt and gather only personally, for me and mine, we make bad decisions. What all is rolled into each purchase and acquisition? We need to consider the long term ramifications of each harvest, extraction, each taking from the commons we all share. And “we all” includes the other animals, and the wider whole fabric of the living web on the planet we share. Are we shredding and tearing this fabric, or mending it?

Is this product we are buying the very best choice, not only for the moment, say, this meal in this moment of appetite? Or does it cost a little more but helps build soil, relationships, a healthy body and sane mind, even steady state economies?

An infinitely expanding economy of the type humans have been living with most recently, requires continuous appropriation of raw materials and resources that are not free at all. They are, in fact, being stolen from us all, the commons, and the future health of our descendants and the world they will inherit. It is based on the philosophy of the cancer cell, uncontrolled proliferation, production and growth now, and nothing else. It is unsustainable and self destructive. 

A sustainable steady state economy still allows for infinite growth, but it is a healthy growth: making ever more time to learn, play, rest, meditate, create art and music, take care of each other, make love, evolve, expand our awareness and growing in compassion. Unlimited growth potential here. 

There is a lot of freedom in this, and maybe not as much emphasis on free stuff. Maybe free stuff is just a poor substitute for freedom itself. Personal freedom will be a casualty of all of this grabbing of unguarded resources, if we don’t change the way we think of economics.

Maybe the impulse to amass and consume free stuff is just a misguided quest for love and learning. Maybe, a way to heal the scarcity thinking that goes with overemphasis on amassing more stuff, is to collect wisdom, amass gratitude, produce more love.

We have, on average, on Earth, for now, the means to stay individually free and autonomous while additionally sharing enough wealth to keep everyone healthy and comfortable. We have enough knowledge to do this sustainability while repairing the environmental damage from before. We have ways and means enough. But do we have the wisdom and the will?

What to Do When You Meet an E.T.

All Beings Forever and Everywhere

Earth people have always been in touch to some degree with so called aliens. It is only recently that humans have called them this. Before that, we called them by other names. But all cultures that have stories mention them. Some fear or worship them.

The universe is one and we are all connected. This is why there are no aliens, only relations we have maybe not met. Or maybe we just do not remember? There is no us and them, there is only us. We tend to only be aware of those beings below our view, and we tend to look mostly downward. But as below, so above. 

There are infinite realms, levels, and dimensions. So as we look at those beings we can easily watch, those below us, who are in our power and view, we arrogantly and ignorantly assume there are none above us, similarly watching us. We cherish the delusion that we are perched grandly at the top of the ladder of the universe. We are like the five year old child who prefers to forget we were in diapers not so long ago. 

When you meet an alien, whether they appear to be of lower rank and power than you, or whether you look like that to them, ultimately we are all equal beings under the eye of the One Source of us all, equally loved children of Creator. There is no need for fear if you remember this. 

However, a being in a state of fear, who is not standing in this awareness, may behave badly toward you. They may lash out at you; they may “other” you. That is why wild animals are a threat to humans if the humans fear them. And it is why some humans who do not engage with wild animals on the fear level are not threatened by them. Some humans have evolved beyond the predator level.

The same is true if you meet an E.T. If you do not engage on a fear level with them, they are just another life form closely or more distantly related to you. Do not engage with an unknown being who wants or needs something from you. Predatory behavior is a form of othering that leads to harm. And by the same token, do not act in a predatory way towards your fellow beings. Given the history of human exploitation of animals, it is no wonder we are so paranoid about aliens; it is karma. 

Love is a great power that will protect and guide you. But make sure it is the love and not the power you are following. There are humans, animals, and so called aliens up there who have power to harm you if you behave foolishly. All of them are beings in their own right with power and some degree of volition. All are your relations. All are your relations. If you do not pick up a love vibration coming from them, do not try to interact. (You could even be dealing with imposter “aliens”, secret deep black fakery.)  Be as harmless a dove, and fly away without a fight, or as wise as a snake, and retreat and hide.

Do not approach a wild animal, hostile human, or attempt to contact someone who is not resonating with you on a love vibration, unless you have enough love to heal them, instead of being harmed by them. There is a time and place for everything and maybe this is not the time for you to commune with them. Call for a Higher Power to assist you in such a threatening situation.

You will meet E.T.s along your infinite path of experience and development as a being. They are bound by the rules of higher evolution to give you respect and observe non interference and non harm. The ones that are here to help do not need anything from you. They can see right through you, though they respect your private thoughts, autonomy and individuality.

Can you not predict what your dog will do when it sees that squirrel, or whatever? It is just like that when more evolved beings look at you; you are far more predictable than you probably think.

But they will not bother you or approach unless you are open to it, or in need of their help. Just as it is inappropriate to worship golden cows, idols, or other humans with greater power or wealth or fame, do not worship E.T.s either. They may indeed have fancy flying means, or tricky powers, but they are just your fellow beings. They deserve your love and respect as equals arising from the same Infinite Creator.

Adventures with my New Tufting Gun!

Adventures with my New Tufting Gun!

Finally get to try out my new tufting gun. It’s like rug hooking or punch needle machine gun. Padda padda padda! Whooo hoooo! Pretty wild! 

I already had the frame prepared with the canvas stretched across it. Getting the frame to hold still while I tuft is the first hurdle. I try holding it with my feet against a table top while shooting with both hands. Hmm. Pretty shaky; tufts come out irregular sized.  Then I clamp the frame to an upside down table which is clamped to the work table. Nice. Sturdy.

I wish I could just draw freehand with my tufting gun, but this is a one way shooter, and that way is just up. Up straight, curved, or diagonal. Mostly people seem to like filling in shapes with lines. Turns out that is the easiest, so I start with that. 

My first project is with homespun merino yarn, a great big ball of it. It works in my gun! What a relief. Just white, just one shape: a cloud. I love clouds; their fractal changing nature, their shapes. Especially the fat fluffy ones that look like sheep.

Some people glue the back to hold the loops in place. The natural latex in my bottle, left over from making soles for felted shoes, has dried up. 

My idea for a natural way to hold it together is to felt it in the back. So I put some loose merino roving on the back, and wet it down with soap, rubbing it gently to adhere the roving to the yarn in the back. Later I stomp it around in the shower to get a good hard join. When I take it out, I have a lovely sheet of felt that peels right off the rug. Oh well. 

So instead I opt for nothing. I sew down the sides of the backing fabric. 

Looks good. Goes well with the sky and clouds motif in the bedroom. Feels good too. We will see how it wears.

“I loved the Little Lulu stories, where she would fantasize that her bedroom rug would turn into a pool of water, and she could dive down into the center of the world.” - Lynn Johnston

The Värmwool Bag

The Värmwool Bag

(“Värmwool”: See previous post)

I love my tools. I love them almost as much as doing the art itself. I also love baskets, as anyone who has been to my studio will notice. Everything is in baskets. 

But I decide that I also need a strong and large bag to tote around with me for my current projects, and the tools I am using with them. 

A basket-like bag, perhaps one that can be semi rigid, like a basket, but also expand a bit as well to fit large or odd shapes.

I double knit the walls of my basket bag into rectangles, and join the sides. Too floppy. The värmwool is strong and thick, but not rigid. 

It gets an inner structure made of repurposed cardboard, and a salvaged rigid plastic bottom to protect it from puddles. 

I make the inner lining out of denim from cut up old jeans, and use the pockets for inner compartments for my smaller tools.

These are the tools and yarns I use to create the unit of art described in the previous post, Blooming Rainbow

The resulting bag is fabulous! It is strong enough and large enough to carry a sewing machine! I love how it came out.