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
