If you aren’t a weaver, you might not know that ORTS are the bits of yarn and fiber that end up on the floor under the loom and THRUMS are the remainders of the warp after you cut the fabric off of the loom. In other words — the bits and pieces, odds and sods, this and that. Saturday is a good Orts and Thrums day.
Looking out on the lake covered with fog this morning, it’s easy to imagine that your distant ancestors not only found the rising mist lovely, but quite mysterious. I can easily see etherial spirits and dancing sprites flowing up from the water. While we eventually learned that the cold air over the warmer water produced this morning fog, I prefer to think of these swirling and skipping threads of air as spirits of the lake.
A Great Read!
Reading Clara Parkes’ Vanishing Fleece: Adventures in American Wool gave me the feeling of watching and listening to the flash mob of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy in the Spanish city of Sabadell in 2012, but performed in reverse.
It started with a spectacularly inspiring and exciting look at Clara’s diving into a full bale of incredible Saxon merino wool (676 pounds), accompanied by booming choruses of the heyday of US textile manufacturing. Her paragraphs then drifted to slower times as to the sweetly dancing strings shivered longingly around businesses that shrank, and closed, or hung on for just a while longer. Finally, at the end, but with hope and purpose, the strains of a single double-bass caught in my throat, forced my heart to skip a beat and gathered tears behind my eyelids. We had to say goodbye not only to the adventure, but also a formative year in her life.
Comparing Clara’s writing to music is pretty easy. She has a very expressive and singularly unique voice. I was struck the first time I met her at how exactly her voice sounded like the words I read in the other books she wrote. I mentioned this to her at the time because I think it is a true talent when a writer’s voice so clearly mirrors their actual voice. I also really appreciate her ability to take a very serious and complex subject and treat it with appropriate gravity and sincerity, but at the same time easing the strain with humor while neither “dumbing it down,” nor diminishing its importance.
Even with the intricate technicalities of sheep-raising and shearing, gears, leavers, spinning mules and frames, shipping, scouring and dying, Vanishing Fleece is an entertaining read. I could barely put it down.
If you have followed Clara Parkes and her Knitter’s Review you will be aware of her ongoing affair with yarn. As a knitter and consumer, she started a newsletter in 2000 to review the yarn world – yarn itself, tools, events and books. She also wrote a series of books, one of which (Knitlandia) ended up on the New York Times bestseller list. Along the way, she even added a knitting retreat that knitters eagerly sign up for annually.
Her quest to spend a year figuring out how to make yarn in the US was launched by the arrival of that 676-pound bale, also known as the “Great White Bale.” And, as that bale threatened to explode and bury her as she broke it open, it did probably feel a bit like she was Ahab about to be drowned by Moby Dick. Sailing the rolling, and often frustrating seas of American farming, ranching, business, industry, and all of the crafts associated with turning wool into yarn turned out to be an enormous education. And Clara certainly turned out to be anything BUT an Ahab, with her desire not to conquer or exact revenge, but to learn, reach, and grow. The people she worked with along the way included friends. She also had to stretch herself to contact people who just might reject her and her project. Her descriptions of these people made them feel like neighbors and family by the time she had toured their scouring plants and spinning mills. These individuals gave her a wealth of time and attention that she has written into this book as an elegy to their incredible hard work and dedication to a business that includes a huge portion of art to make it all work.
It is hard to know what will become of the remnants of what once was a huge wool industry in America. Clara points out that formerly robust university programs that supported the wool industry have closed. Factories have shuttered as businesses have outsourced manufacturing overseas. Most of the remaining small mills and allied business are managed by people of retirement age and beyond. For the moment, the market for expensive, artisanal yarns is pretty good. Interest in knitting ebbs and flows. Right now it isn’t unusual for a knitter to spend as much as $25-$30 on a single skein of yarn. They will even put themselves on waiting lists for the output from individual dyers, or from Clara’s own yarn offerings. Even at these prices, however, this is a business with a very thin profit margin. Even with Internet shopping and sites like Etsy, makers come, and frequently go.
I read Vanishing Fleece with no small measure of regret for what we as a nation have lost in the quest for consumerism and profit. At the same time, as the world continues to change, we need to remind ourselves that we have the power to change the world by supporting what we find to be of value. Clara will make you look at yarn very differently – and that’s a value we all can embrace.
Another Book
I’m thrilled to see that Ivar Asplund’s Sticka Flätor is now available in English from Trafalgar Square Press. I reviewed this in my profile of Ivar earlier this year. If you didn’t race out to get the Swedish version, you will want to get the new release now. It it worth every penny.
About that sweater
Finally, I’ve been struggling a little with my sweater for Bruce. With every project, he encourages me to try something new or different (except for socks for him that have very specific softness requirements). Well, ok, I did that by making this a bottom-up, knit in one piece to the arm scye version (I really prefer seaming), and I had to work out the yarn distribution to take into account that I didn’t have enough of either grey for the entire sweater. I’m also doing this as a “design as you go” project. I looked at a couple of printed patterns to decide on the location of the bottom of the “V” for the neckline (it’s a v-neck cardi), and for the width of the opening at the neck. However, I’m basically fitting this to him as I go, calculating increases and decreases on the fly. [Note: I don’t really recommend this as a method of design — it works ok since this is a simple silhouette, but can set you up for lots of ripping back if you don’t pay attention.]
Stripes wouldn’t have been a stretch, and after swatching for cables and other textures I was a little baffled. This yarn (Yllet — a Swedish Gotland/Faulklands merino mix spun in Denmark) has a nice rustic crunchiness, and a decent softness after washing and blocking. It’s also quite fuzzy, and has a lovely bloom that (sadly) tends to obscure and hide stitches. So no 2-color cables to spread out the colors. After about 30 different stitch combinations, I came back to a broken rib that alternated the two colors for the bottom deep rib, with the same pattern at the yoke.
I wasn’t in love with the stripes on the ribbing, but after putting it down to go get another cup of coffee, it dawned on me that the inside (wrong side) actually looked more like a tweed than a stripe. Ta da! So I kept going until I had about 4.5 inches, turned it inside out, and kept going.
The trouble has been that now that I’m working on the yoke and shoulders, I can’t seem to stop the yarn from striping. I am assured by the Wednesday knitters that the two sections are far enough apart that it will look fine. I’m unconvinced. As such, I will begin the sad process of ripping back (AGAIN) in pursuit of that nubby, tweedy rib from the bottom. Part of my stubbornness in this regard is that I was suddenly realizing I might not have enough of the lighter grey for the sleeves unless I striped them as well.
Well, here’s the good news. I decided to do a little straightening up yesterday (don’t faint — it was short-lived), and I found (re-found?) another skein of the light grey, meaning I have two for the sleeves, so only the bottom ribbing (which also will be deep like the bottom of the sweater) will be striped. Whew! That was a close one. However, I’m still not 100% sure why the two ribbed sections don’t match. When I finally figure it out, I’m sure I’ll be shaking my head and wondering what took me so long. Best of all, Bruce will finally have his sweater.