A Fiber Artist’s House

A Fiber Artist’s House


“Every aspect of our lives is, in a sense, a vote for the kind of world we want to live in.” 

-Frances Moore Lappé

We set out to convert an old house into an eco house. From top to bottom, we want to make it healthy and environmentally friendly, both for people inside, and the whole planet around it. We take a look at the situation:

First, we tear out the ancient wall to wall nylon carpet, and find enough finely matriculated dirt underneath to plant a small garden in! Plastic carpets like this are ecosystems for nasty pathogens. They can never be truly cleaned.




“There are two types of cleanliness: organic cleanliness and chemical cleanliness. Often chemical cleanliness is toxic and harmful. Natural or organic cleanliness focus on maintaining harmony with nature.” -Amit Ray




The hard wood floor beneath is solid; so we sand it as smooth as possible and varnish with non toxic plant oil based lacquer. These days, green chemistry makes it possible to find any kind of home care and fixing products now being formulated to green standards. The only reason they all used to be toxic, replete with scary warnings on every can, is we had access to petroleum that was cheaper than water, so companies developed all of their paints, glues, and lacquers with fossil oil. 




Most of the windows are single pane, and have long obsolete, rope opening pulleys; and will no longer open, so we order new ones: the best air is fresh air. 




As a back up, we get an air purifier. A couple of summers ago, we all hunkered down in a closed up house for a couple of weeks, surrounded by a storm of smoke, blackening the sky and blotting out the sun.  The record breaking fire was the result of poor electric infrastructure maintenance, bad forestry practices (the replanted with “monocrop tree farm forest” burned far more than the never logged forest areas), and mega drought, caused by global climate catastrophe.




We check the water supply. Our watershed, serving drinking water to 200,000 people below, is quite clean. This is due to a long term ban on the use of forestry chemicals, now partially suspended but carefully monitored and heavily litigated, and a lot of forest and snowy mountains above feeding it. There are no detectable contaminants, at any level. The filtration system has caught all of the charcoal and debris from the huge forest fires up there a couple of years ago. The water coming INTO the filtration system is so pure, most towns and cities would be overjoyed to have what is coming  OUT of their filtration system be that good!


The roof has a small leak, so we research how to fix it with the idea of eventually putting solar panels up there. We look into solar shingles, but conclude the technology is not quite fully developed enough yet.

The house has a dirty, diesel oil burning, heat system, which is failing, so we begin the process of converting to heat pump, which does both heating and cooling.

The stove is electric, but we recently discovered convection cooking, so we consider if it needs to be replaced.





“Do your little bit of good where you are; it’s those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.” – Archbishop Desmond Tutu




But for this fiber artist, the fun part is the soft infrastructure: the furnishings. We want this to be an all organic house. We discover that all bedding and furniture in this country is by law subject to being treated with toxic fire retardant chemicals. This is not in keeping with our organic goal, nor does it make health sense if you consider how much of your life you spend snuggled up with these pillows and mattresses! We find that some bedding is exempt from the requirements to spray these chemicals, the ones that are naturally fire retardant, such as wool.




But wool brings up another issue, how is this wool sourced? Are the animals cherished, or dipped in chemicals, shaved, and cut up to be lamb chops? The best we can do is look for organically grown wool. We order an all organic, chemical free, wool and cotton, futon and bed.

 I find a solid real wood bed frame, not chip and glue board, sourced from nearby forest lands, at a secondhand store.


What about sheets, pillows, and blankets? This leads me to a book, The Fabric of Civilization. Even though cloth is soft, and unlike gold, subject to decay, it has always held a position of great status and value in every culture, the cultural treasure of every land.

 Until modern times, anyway. Now we associate cloth with chemicals, cheapness, plastic pollution, miserable factory conditions, animal abuse, waste, and exploitation of land and water. When we wash our plastic nylon or polyester clothes, the water we use sends microplastics into the water, air, and eventually everywhere on Earth. It is now being found in the bloodstream of humans as well. This is not good.

How do we begin to change that? We start right here at this house, I resolve.








Cotton that is grown organically often has shorter fibers, and can be less soft, so often chemical softeners and other processes are added after the cloth is made. So you have to look for at least two different certifications: the Global Organic Textile Standard certifies that the cotton was grown organically. GOTS is the most widely recognized textile standard built upon the organic production standards. This protects the land and water, and not trivially, the people who work around the fiber plants in the field to grow and handle it. 




But then you must continue to follow your sheets, pillowcases, and blankets. OEKO-TEX® is a worldwide consistent, independent testing and certification system for raw, semi-finished, and finished textile products at all processing levels, as well as accessory materials used. They actually test the finished product, to make sure there is nothing toxic that has been added, on its way to you.




There are other wonderful plant based fabrics. Rayon is shiny, cool, and comfortable. If you have a sarong, it is likely it is made of rayon. But although there is an ongoing attempt now, to develop and purvey environmentally friendly rayon, most is still made using lots of chemicals and lots of water. Bamboo is a lot like rayon, and can easily be grown organically. Bamboo is less water hungry than cotton.




But it suffers from some of the same drawbacks as other plant based fibers after harvesting: these fibers grow in areas of the world where environmental protection and labor conditions may be poorly enforced, or land may be inappropriately converted to fiber production in sensitive areas. But at least, the fabric production process can then be confined to a facility, where, if there is insistence on proper labor and safety standards, it can be accomplished without harm to health and life. That is better than letting pesticides run all over land and water, as in typical cotton fields. 







“Organic farming is about buying out of a corrupt, illegal and dishonest system.” 

-Jerry Brown




But you start where you are, and you do what you can do. And every dollar is a vote. So I get some certified organic GOTS and OEKO-TEX sheets, pillowcases, and blankets.  I’m sure there are cheaters and counterfeits out there, but if we all make an effort, insist on harm reduction, and back it up with inspections, eventually the people and planet friendly ways will become commonplace. Toxic products are only cheaper when we do not include the environmental cost in the price. Better to pay now, for the kind of future we would want. So I put in my order for a clean healthy future, instead of a sick and contentious one.




And as for wool blankets, I got that one! I spin yarn from the raw fleeces of lovely happy sheep from my neighborhood. I know their names, and I know their people, who love them as pets and take good care of them. I weave the blankets myself. It is a true joy:

 Now I’m working on sewing a comforter using those sheets and my wool as batting.




What about pillows? We have been sleep testing different kinds, and I have been making those too. Natural latex, from trees, is chemically quite different from petroleum based latex.

Natural latex:

Dandelion milk contains latex. Its latex exhibits the same quality as the natural rubber from rubber trees. I step out of the house, and find it takes only four steps to reach the nearest dandelion flower. Natural alternatives surround us, we need only ask and look around. (In the wild types of dandelion, latex content varies greatly.)

I make some pillows with organic latex filling, wrapped in a wool batting layer. 

Homemade carded wool batting:

My favorite pillow is currently my buckwheat hull pillow. It is traditional in parts of Asia, but new to the West. My buckwheat pillow is really just a small, but weighty, and somewhat noisy, sack of buckwheat hulls, that I have sewn. It rustles when you move it. But I absolutely love how well you can shape it to your exact preference. And it does hold that shape with soft support.

Buckwheat hulls:

And then there is kapok. (KAY-pock) Kapok grows on tall trees and makes huge fluffy pineapple sized pods, filled with silken cottony fiber. Kapok grows year after year and needs no special care or chemical intervention. It is long lasting: some pillows made of kapok are still in use a hundred years later! It is naturally antibacterial. I have made some kapok pillows with the bale I bought, and like them very much. Unlike polyester pillows, you have to fluff them every day.

Kapok fiber:

“Far from being a “luxury for the rich,” organic farming may turn out to be a necessity not just for the poor, but for everyone.” - Raj Patel




The mattress topper I want will have to wait, because it is too costly to buy unless I save up. It is like a bed sized sheepskin, except no sheep are harmed! Instead the wool of happy well cared for sheep is used to thread through a base of organic cotton canvas to make a natural, thick supportive layer of bouncy vertical wool. It is made here in the northwest by a company called Holy Lamb.


Bit by bit, the eco house is coming together, and it is a learning experience, an act of constructive change, an investment in the kind of planet we want to live on, a work of art, and a spiritual offering.


“An organic farmer is the best peacemaker today, because there is more violence, more death, more destruction, more wars, through a violent industrial agricultural system. And to shift away from that into an agriculture of peace is what organic farming is doing.” -Vandana Shiva







Predator Glamour

Predator Glamour


When I was six, I went to a church run school, where I was introduced to bible stories for the first time. There was the creation story, where Adam and Eve eat some fruit, which somehow, was bad. Then, when they have kids, there is a competition for God’s favor: one son eats animals, the other one eats a plant based diet. I still remember being shocked that God liked the meat eater better! That was the beginning of my suspicion that something was wrong here.


This strange headspace has continued to this day. Everywhere on this violent planet, cultures admire the predators. Hawks, eagles, lions, tigers, bears, sharks. It is a plus if they are poisonous, like cobras, scorpions, or sting rays. We love to name cars, sports teams, and weapons systems after the predators. What is the attraction, the source of this admiration? A predator is a murderer and a thief, violently stealing life force from its prey.  

What is to admire in that? Who can blame animal predators that act on instinct, shaped by long evolution, fitting into their place in nature. Seems like the vultures deserve more admiration, then, for cleaning up the rotting bodies dropped by animals who have moved on and no longer need them?




Why is it that we seem to think if we are not the top killer, we must then be the prey, the victim, the loser? Why this duality? Why do we have to be the biggest baddest scariest predator?




The whole predator-prey duality is the same coin with two sides. We need to rise above the binary. Violence or hate can’t be defeated with the same; only love can encompass and then transcend the binary. As long as we are enthralled with the predator-prey duality, we will not be empowered to garden this beautiful world as the true leaders we fancy ourselves to be. 




We will just be the top predator, living in the self created chains of our fear, destined to be displaced in that role by the next predators to come along.




I have difficulty finding the right words to describe what we are on this planet, if not the apex predator. The masters of the planet? The property managers? The owners? Every description is stuck in this binary of predator and prey, dripping with rankist, dominator based, hierarchical language. 




We are in charge of running the planet? Ruining the planet, maybe. 


We aren’t even in charge of ourselves. We may say we want to have mastery over ourselves, but a lot of damage is being done right now by efforts to have control, not of ourselves, but to exert control over other people. And all of the creatures, and the environment, and even the future of all life on earth!

Maybe we are the keepers of the garden?




Why not be instead, the comprehensive cooperative compassionate gardener? Who is more wise, indeed, more truly powerful? Every positive loving thought, or love motivated action is ten times more creative and powerful than a negative violent one. 




Who is truly worthy of our admiration, the mother who spends years pouring gentle love and attention into the next generation, or the fighter who can kill some hapless animal or person in a single swipe? The gardener who skillfully and patiently works with nature to bring nourishment to many, or the hunter who pounces on prey like a lion?


 We are needed to take responsibility for the whole planet now, with loving care. There is no place for the nonsense of the glamorizing of predatory behavior anymore. Somehow, we must get out of this binary trap. 
The only way to rise above the dominater-victim duality is to stop being the predator and start being the gardener. To give a care, and take care for the whole thing. To think comprehensively, to take whole systems into account when making decisions.  To move in cooperation with the beings and other life forms who together make up ecosystems. To be aware of the trajectory of our actions on the axis of time lines that reach into the future, that have evolved to carry forth the wisdom experience of the past. To truly be in charge of our resources, instead of charging around destroying stuff.




“You can’t take sides when you know the Earth is round” -P. Sun

Travel Threads

Travel Diaries

We are traveling light. 

My fiber yarn of choice for traveling is my embroidery floss bag. 

I gather some twigs fallen from the trees as we wander. 

I like the kind with little knobs on both ends. 

One twig is a perfect equal cross, so it is just right for a God’s eye.

Ojo de Dios.

We are visiting my favorite mountain, and I gather the colors of the mountain and its setting of sky and trees from my yarn bag.

 The center, the focalizing point of the ojo is the mountain, of course. 

It is glistening, snow covered, a crystal outstanding 14,000 feet in the deep blue sky, with the forest greens all around.

First I weave mountain, then sky, then forest. 

Soon I will add tassels.

“Some people have had visions during sacred ceremonies in which they received guidance from Infinite Creator who appeared before them in many shapes, though the eyes of the God were so intense and overwhelming that many could only see the eye of the God. To show others the vision they had, they made the God's eye - woven on sticks with handspun yarn, colored with various types of berries, flowers, and other materials to capture the essence of their vision.” Wikipedia 

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.