When the Hoo-Doo Trance Takes Me

I was on fire...





I mordanted .5 lbs of BFL roving in tin and another .5lbs in alum, along with .5 lbs of soysilk. Check out that yellow! That is osage with the tin mordant. A keeper. The lighter yellow is the soysilk, the deep purple/red is a mixture of cochineal and brazil wood with the tin mordant.

While I was burning up the kitchen with the joo-joo magic of plant dyes, I thought I needed some strong orange so I did use a wee bit of kool aid on another .5 lb of merino. What can I say? Sometimes it gives you the results you crave. Then I made fast and loose with some onion skins that I had collected over the past weeks. I didn't even mordant the yarn. Yee-ow! The dye bath was a lovely colour but it wasn't really translating to the yarn so I thought I would add just a touch of iron, which is a mordant that is usually added afterwards. With a look of horror on my face, I watched my golden russet colour change to this:



Holy moly. But all was well when I realized that it was dyeing the wool a greenish/brown colour that is actually really lovely. In fact, it is definitely another keeper. This photo doesn't really do it justice - the colour is quite rich.



All in all, a good morning's work.

Do Not Adjust Your Set

Those colours are real!

Chop Wood, Carry Water

Lately I have been struck by the difference between urban and rural physical activities. In Sunnyside, we have a gym literally in our backyard. I think I have a picture here somewhere. Here is our backyard in mid-May looking absurdly lush:



See the vine-covered brick wall? That is actually the back of a gym. I go there regularly as a way of keeping the wolves of gravity and heart disease at bay (and I like a good sweat). But it is full of machines to artificially create what was once a normal part of daily life so it always feels a bit weird. I won't even go into the amount of electricity that place uses between all the machines and TVs, stereo systems, lights, etc.. This routine is supplemented by a large amount of walking because, in NYC, walking is king. The one comment always heard from tourists is about how much they walked, which is I suppose revealing of how much people in other places don't walk anymore. Life in NYC can have many rhythms and one of the strongest is the walker's rhythm. It is easy to get caught up in the wave of pedestrians and walk miles without being conscious of "working out" or anything at all except the flow of the street. It is one of the greatest pleasures of city life, in my opinion.

When I think about leaving that behind I have a moment of panic. What will happen when we come to Gillams with no gym and where it takes an act of personal virtue and strong will to walk anywhere? But I really don't have to worry because rural life has its own rhythm and requires its own kind of physical labour. For one, I have my non-electric washing machine that requires carrying buckets of water to and fro and 200 agitations/load. Then we have our woodstove that requires kindling to be chopped, although I freely admit that I get Dan to do most of that work since I am a terrible woodsman. To keep the grass trimmed, I use a push mower and clippers, and given the dandelion situation, this is a full-body workout.

Then there is the garden. I was trying to upload a photo of my garden bed which looks like nothing so much as a recent burial, but blogger won't let me for reasons unknown. In any case, these are the beds in my "lasagna garden", a technique that layers soil and other goodies on top of the hardcore weeds and rocks that masquerade as "soil" here and allow one to grow things like vegetables and flowers. Most of my neighbors have given up on such shocking luxuries because of said weeds and rocks, and they looked askance at me when I started in with the lasagna thing. I had a nice moment yesterday when a couple of them came over to admire my beds and admit that perhaps I wasn't completely insane. I also have another plot of garden that isn't using the lasagna technique - I think of it as my "control" bed in this experiment. This is a bed that is about the size of a queen-sized bed that has taken me two years of tilling and fertilizing to get to the point where I might be able to plant in it. Originally it took me weeks with a pick axe to get the bed started. Then last year, it took a couple of days to till over plus all summer to add compost. But yesterday I was able to go over it with the pick axe in about an hour. For that pleasure, my back is a bit sore and I am reminded of areas of in my shoulder blades that I normally take for granted. And so it goes here in Gillams. No gym, not much regular walking, but just the act of living day to day is a workout.

Apple Blossoms

It is apple blossom time.

BTW: Do Not Squander Your Life

I am stealing a moment from preparations for a visit to THM from two representatives from the Newfoundland government who are coming by this morning. They are visiting the west coast to talk with craftspeople about issues related to their craft and tourism. They wanted to meet with a group of artisans in the Corner Brook area to talk about ideas related to a conference on that topic they are planning for next spring. Shawn generously suggested that THM would be the appropriate place to meet, given that it is all about culture and tourism, and that I now count myself among the craftspeople on the west coast. I have had to get the place in shape in its THM incarnation to some extent, as well as get my yarn and spinning stuff to look a little less like I have been madly grabbing colours and fibres in my wild-eyed spinning binge. I am not quite finished yet but I think it will be ok. Olive has promised to bring her rhubarb/apple muffins and I have just pulled a lemon blueberry coffee cake from the oven, so we can stun them with baked goods if all else fails.

In the meantime, this is my 200th blog post! It calls for some kind of reflection.

How about this. Called the Evening Gatha, I first noticed it as a little sign that is beautifully written in calligraphy and hung over the entrance to the zendo in Brooklyn where I sit zazen. I have long planned to crochet an antimacassar with the last two lines on it. Time swiftly passes by...

Let me respectfully remind you,
life and death are of supreme importance.
Time swiftly passes by and opportunity is lost.
Each of us should strive to awaken... awaken...
Take heed.
Do not squander your life.

Fermentation

When we returned from Shawn's house yesterday, I discovered that my sourdough starter had finally decided to ferment actively. In fact, so actively that it had overflowed its container and was fermenting down the side of our fridge and on to the floor. Gooey! It was clear that I need to bake bread immediately.



Oh my dears, you won't find this at Sobey's!




With that taken care of, I could again concentrate on yarn...





Things are bubbling up all over!

I knit up the sample I made the other day and it helped me understand how to make the yarn better. The funny thing about these "wild" yarns is that they take a ton of planning and preparation.

Today we head into to Corner Brook to have a minor repair done to our car but more exciting than that is that we will spend our time waiting for the car to be fixed at Shawn's house helping her get acquainted with her new spinning wheel. Never have I hoped more that a car repair will take a good long time!

I've Been Tagged

Patti is the culprit, but since this is my first (aaaww), I am excited to answer the call. So what were those questions...? Oh yes...

What was I doing 10 years ago?
Jasus, I can hardly remember 10 minutes ago, but let's see...I was in the middle of being pregnant with Lucy while chasing around an 18 month old Finnian. I do remember reaching a point where Finn could run faster than me but I don't think I had quite achieved that level of immense pregnancy by June. Other than that I mostly don't remember much, which is the world's way of encouraging you to have more children.

What are the 5 things on my to do list for today (in no particular order)
1. Bake bread and try to get my sourdough starter to be more active. I always get one going in Gillams and every year it takes much longer than the stated four days to really get it to work. I don't know why but it does. I will make a non-sourdough focaccia today, which may be the world's most quick and simple yet tasty bread.
2. Make an appointment at our local bank for when Dan arrives so we can set up joint accounts now that we are officially Landed Immigrants (hooray!!). Bummer about the state of the US dollar, however...
3. "Gently" encourage F&L to do more than sit around in their pjs reading books all day. Humph.
4. Have I said anything about spinning yet? Maybe some carding too. I know, such a party animal!
5. IF there is time among the cooking and cleaning that has gone as yet unmentioned, I will do some yoga led by my new favorite yogi, Shiva Rea. I would drink that woman's bath water!

Snacks I enjoy
Almonds. Dates, if I need a sweet thing. And I do have a less admirable weakness (read: addiction) for potato chips. We are all heavily into the salt and pepper chips that are popular here.

Things I would do if I were a billionaire
Billionaire? That sounds exhausting. I suppose we would travel spontaneously, raise sheep (and hire people to care for them while we travel spontaneously), and work hard to give away all that money.

Places I’ve lived
Burlington, Gloucester, and West Boxford, MA, Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens, NY, Hoboken, NJ, Westerly, RI, Jamaica Plains, MA, Gillams, NL. What can I say? I am a northeast kind of gal.

People I want to know more about
Oh my, I fear most of my favourite online friends don't like this kind of thing! Will I be breaking the chain if I don't tag people? I am worried they will be irritated...so....you know who you are. I want to know more about you! We all do!

Go With the Flow

I know they are sweating bullets in NYC right now but it is cold and rainy here. While my garden is getting nowhere, my spinning continues to be very engaging. I made up a little sample yesterday:


It was kind of pain to have to stop and add the little bits but part of that was not knowing if it would look like what I wanted it to look like. After I put together to wool part, I plied it with crochet cotton - just propped the spool on the lazy kate and started plying. I am pretty happy with the sample so I think I will try to make up a whole skein.


One thing I have noticed in my experiments is that, although I know that certain colours and textures have a certain look that would be popular, if I don't like them, I can't spin them. Or rather, my patience with spinning them is very limited. It is like you know you could write a Harlequin Romance and make money but the process of actually doing it is so forced and unpleasant that it actually can't happen.

Or something like that...

Betwixt and Between

Things are taking shape for the summer - not the shape I anticipated when we drove away last September but something new and different. Last summer I started a conversation with a local Mi'kmaq group about presenting a project at The House Museum that would relate to the history of the North Shore and its inhabitants. I met with a dynamic woman who was very excited about some ideas we brainstormed. An FYI - the North Shore is known as a place where many people have mixed (First Nation/European) blood. This has been a sore point for many, many years with many people, something seen as shameful, and it is only recently that people have started to feel genuine pride in their heritage. I wanted to explore this tension, as well as the way local history has conveniently left out most of the Mi'kmaq story.

Things were cooking along but somewhere around December, things quieted down. Then, as we prepared to head up in May, I dropped a note to my contact suggesting we get together shortly after my arrival. Silence. It was at this point that I started thinking about what would happen if I had no special project for THM this year. And I started to think about how, in many ways, this would be a lovely thing. The silence of my Mi'kmaq friend was no longer a frustration or mystery but a gift. (Isn't it amazing how a simple shift in your mind can re-shape the world - just a side note, that.)

The fact of the matter is that my intentions in creating THM were born of a set of circumstances that I observed in 1997 and 2001. Now, seven years later, Newfoundland is a very different place. The point of THM was to create a space that blurred boundaries between tourists and locals in hopes of creating a new way of presenting culture. I wanted to offer an opportunity for people normally overlooked in the decisions about what and how to present in the culture to be integral to the process. This need no longer seems so urgent. Indeed, many of those decisions have been made and formalized and the "tourist industry" has grown shockingly quickly in these seven seasons.

I also created THM as a way of blurring the boundaries between art and life in my own life. The house as museum, my entire life as art project, has been a much harder project than I first imagined. My experience of it has been that, by summer's end, I am wiped out from the constant sense of being on public display, or at least potentially, at any moment, being on public display. I would be lying if I said I was not a little tempted to have a summer (after a very busy winter/spring) where I could be a little more private and quiet.

So all signs point to a summer of reassessment and reflection on the purpose of this thing I have made. It is causing me to look afresh at Newfoundland, the North Shore, Gillams. While some of that re-examination has knocked the stars from my eyes, the flip side to it is that I am beginning to feel a re-kindling of what it was that originally compelled me to take up residence in this place. Somehow that interest got a little lost in all the events and brochures and visiting hours. It is reassuring and kind of exhilarating to know it is still there. It makes me feel ok about the fact that not all 30,000 residents of the Bay of Island will be directly involved in my project and it gives me permission to make my house...well...my house. Still an artwork, still an expression of what it is like to be betwixt and between in the culture but just not a tourist attraction.

And then, of course, there is the yarn...

See What an Evening with Shawn Will Do

It is a gorgeous, sunny day today so it is no day to be thinking about things past. No, today is a day to be in the present moment! In my present moment, I am being totally inspired by a book that the gorgeous, sunny Shawn loaned me. It is called Intertwined: The Art of Handspun Yarn, Modern Patterns and Creative Spinning. The author has become well known for her wild yarns spun from the usual suspects: wool, alpaca, etc., but also fabric, beads, buttons, newspaper, springs and washers, you name it. I have never seen such yarn. Some of it seems like it might be unpleasant to knit up (if very fun to make) but many of the projects she makes are just fantasic and fun and very inspiring.

My spinning to date has very much been about improving and adding to my skills, but after reading and looking at this book, I feel ready to break some rules. My first attempt was made as part of the etsyFAST (Fibre Artist Street Team) June challenge, the theme of which is heroes. I chose Elizabeth Goudie. Elizabeth Goudie was among the last generation of women married to trappers in Labrador who had to survive in that harsh environment, often for months at a time with small children, before any modernization came to that part of the province. She also is the only woman, as far as I know, to ever write an autobiography about what that experience was like. To read her story is to be awed by her mental and physical strength as well as her amazing attitude about life. I made her yarn from a wide variety of fibres, all in their natural colours - mostly white to symbolize the snow of Labrador (it is still falling there, btw). I added some browns and greys because her life, like the Labrador landscape, was not all pristine and contained a good dose of hardship and tragedy. I plied it with a bit of sparkle. I wanted to give her a little glamour and glitter after all her hard work.

Here is Elizabeth Goudie's yarn:



But after enlightenment, the laundry, as they say. And so it will be on this sunny day but perhaps there will a moment or two to spin some more. The ideas are flowing fast and furious.

The Three Ps

Well, still without internet over here in Gillams (I am at the Corner Brook Public Library, which I must say is much nicer than our branch in Sunnyside). I am hopeful that, with a little luck from Canada Post, I will be back online within the week but I am not setting my watch by it.

This time away from email and internet has taught me a number of things. One is patience. The hyperspeed of everything internet is addictive and habit-forming. The pace of life without these elements is much, much slower and required a lesson, for me, in patience. Patience while it took a week to "check the lines" to figure out if I could get high speed internet (answer: no), patience while I worked out what my options were, patience when I discovered that Apple in Canada doesn't take American credit cards (I know, I know, aren't they supposed to be cutting edge??). And now patience while I await the delivery of a little piece of equipment that had to be mailed via NYC. All this patience led to my second P.

Productivity. When you are not checking email a dozen times a day and getting sucked into the sticky world wide web, you have lots and lots of time to do other things! Amazing! So, I have been dyeing and spinning and knitting like a mother bitch (with apologies to Mighty Boosh fans). I just mailed the remaining skeins to fill the order with the craft council shop in St. John's, I have skeins awaiting for etsy, I have a bucket of fleece ready to spin. Plus I have been working on some prototypes of knit items that I hope to sell at a small craft fair in late July here. Busy as freaking bee.

And the final P: privacy. Each year, when we make our way north, the experience of place takes on a different flavour. This year, with its numerous frustrations, has given me a more nuanced look at what is life here. In addition to the internet snafu, I have been wrestling with some issues related to The House Museum and its direction for this summer. I would like to explore them further here but I will say that it is possible and even probable that THM will have a very limited season this year for several reasons. The more that this possibility takes shape, the more I grow attached to the idea of having a private summer. A summer where people are not dropping in at any moment for a tour. After a busy winter and early spring, this idea is quite attractive. But, as I say, it is complicated by several factors. For the time being, I am spinning and knitting and enjoying the distinct lack of car tires crunching on the gravel in the driveway.

Hope to talk with you soon!

hello, hello

No, we haven't fallen off the face of the earth. We are just experiencing a complete lack of internet access. I hope it will be resolved soon as I have lots of cool plant-dyed fleece to show off.

Can You Stand It?

A CD with photographs of The Knitted Mile just arrived from Shannon Stratton, one of the curators of Gestures of Resistance. Her photos were so different from mine (given that she was photographing while I was laying the piece down on the road), that I feel I must post just a few here. I don't care what the naysayers say, looking at the photographs brought back to me just how lovely, poignant, funny, strange it was that cold morning in Dallas.

Books, I Like'em

Rather than bore you to tears with tales of packing and racing around trying to pretend that all the loose ends of a life can be tied up neatly in a couple of days, I will share something completely different. Browsing through some blogs, I came across one by a person who lives in Sunnyside: Reading Is My Superpower. I love that name. Anyway, she listed her top twenty all-time favorite books of fiction. While I liked her list, I think I have some differing ideas, although I also realized that I have a very hard time coming up with twenty books. So, here is my list of my ten all-time favorites:

1. Middlemarch by George Eliot. There simply is no better book ever written. Sorry, but it's true.

After this they are in no particular order of favourite-ness.

2. Bleak House by Charles Dickens (I also recommend the BBC dramatization of this book)
3. Stuart Little by E.B. White (actually, just about anything by E.B. White)
4. Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind by Shunryu Suzuki (not really fiction but a very good book)
5. Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald
6. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
7. A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh
8. The Grey Islands by John Steffler
9 and 10. The whole series of books by Ngaio Marsh, P.G. Wodehouse and Dorothy Sayers

I never realized I was such a literary Anglophile until just now.

And there is a whole category of books that are only eluded to in that list and this is, novels written for ages 9-12: The Melendy stories, The Wheel on the School, From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. I could go on.

What's your list? Patti? Shawn? I would ask Helen but I know she doesn't like that.

Shipping Off

Here is my very first order of yarn being sent to the Craft Council shop in St. John's. Actually it is part of the order--the rest will be shipped after we get to Gillams (and I spin it up!). It takes a bit of work to prepare it to be sent. Besides the dyeing and spinning part, I need to measure the yardage, which I can do fairly easily because each wrap around my niddy noddy is equal to two yards. I just count up the strands and double it. Then I weigh the skein and finally I measure the number of wraps/inch. This allows me to say with certainty what the weight is (worsted, DK, bulky, etc.). All that information gets written on the label, which is wrapped around the yarn and taped. Now it is ready to go.

Some of the skeins are newly spun and some had been listed in my etsy shop for several months but had not sold. I have discovered something about selling on etsy--it is harder to sell yarn that is more subtle in its colouring. I have a couple of skeins of yarn that I think are gorgeous but somehow the photographs don't do it justice and it just doesn't leap off the screen at you. I have faith that people looking for yarn at the shop will be able to recognize its beauty in person.

I wish them farewell with the knowledge that we will arrive on the island at about the same time, albeit on different coasts

You Must Be Mistaken

Over at Enchanting Juno, she got talking about stash and that led to talking about being open to making mistakes and forging ahead anyway.

Yesterday, I watched this video about education and creativity. It wasn't anything new to this unschooler but lovely to hear and to feel the reinforcement of ideas that are so often seen as going against the tide or just plain crazy. One of the speaker's main points was that children are not afraid of mistakes: they just go with it and correct as they go and sometimes they come up with something great. He was saying that creativity is about not fearing mistakes.

I am a lucky person - my stock and trade is creativity. As someone once said, you become an artist because it is impossible to do anything else. And if you can do something else, do it! You will be much happier (I would add, and richer and have less stuff cluttering your house). I think the idea that one would be happier NOT being an artist is related to the way mistakes go hand in hand with creativity.

Mistakes are funny things, really. I remember, back in my painting days, knowing in my gut from the first brush stroke - the very first one! - whether or not a painting would work or would suck. And those paintings that were doomed from brush stroke one were so infuriating every time because, every time, I would keep going, knowing that it sucked but believing I could make it right. No amount of paint applied and removed could ever fix it. I know other painters who have described the same experience. Now that I am no longer painting, I have had the experience knitting. Not exactly from the first stitch, but definitely from the first row, I know that the piece just isn't right . I keep adjusting and convincing myself that somehow I can make it work but really I should just chuck it and start something else.

So why do we persist, even when all the signs are clear that this one is doomed? I wonder if this is how George Bush feels about his Iraq caper? He started it, it sucked from the very first moment, but he is sure, sure!, that if he just adjusts this and twists that, it will all work out in the end.

Unlike Bush's war, a failed painting or knitting project is something we can laugh about eventually. We can try again, start fresh or, even better, transform the mistake into something unexpected and new and wonderful. And that's the beauty of mistakes and creativity. It is the only way, the only painful, humbling, irritating way to inch towards something new.

The Pressure Is On

We are winding things up here in NYC and we are casting our thoughts northward. Every year at this time I start to have regrets and doubts about what I am doing and why. Suddenly there are 1000 fascinating things happening here that we will miss and the idea of shifting households seems overwhelming. Meanwhile, I reviewed our next week's calendar and I don't really see a group of hours in which to pack and, oddly enough, Wee Ball Yarns has suddenly become popular in a very modest way but enough that I am wondering when I will be able to squeeze in some serious spinning time. My cup is spilling over. Big time. This mad rush of activity mingled with anxiety happens every year. Yet, somehow, as soon as we get past my mom's house in Massachusetts, which is the usual northern limits of our Sept - May travels, the adventure begins and the excitement of another season in Newfoundland takes hold. That first grilled cheese sandwich with a side of fries is the signal: Newfoundland here we come!

Dressing Up Mutton to Look Like Lamb

That phrase is a saying I heard spoken by Australian guy I met in Rome in 1986 and it has stuck with me ever since. I even used it as a the title of a piece I made in which I covered a sitting room in knitwear. But it comes back to me now because of this item:



Isn't it lovely? I thought so too when I saw the ad on craigslist. A spinning wheel for $50! Great!, I thought, I'll buy it and give it away to someone who has been dying for a wheel. I knew it was old and therefore not a great production wheel, but for $50, who cares. Someone out there needs a wheel and I was prepared to give it to them.

I drove out to NJ to pick it up on Saturday morning. The woman who was selling it only knew that it belonged to her grandmother for at least 50 years. She was thrilled it would find a happy home with someone who could use it. She almost forgot to even take the money for it.

It is at this point that a certain surprise registered with me at how light the spinning wheel was. I have two wheels and they both, while not heavyweights, are substantial enough that I don't enjoy carrying them around much further than from my dining room to my living room i.e. about 5 feet. This one I could lift with one hand. Hmmmmm....

Nevertheless, I got the wheel home and excitedly put a drive band on it (there was none), happily noting that it was a double drive. Cool. I eagerly whipped out a bit of roving and sat down. It was squeaky, but no problem, a little oil will fix that in a jiffy. The single treadle was a little fussier than what I am used to, but in a few minutes I had mastered it. Ok, now to thread the leader yarn. There was already yarn on the bobbin so I just hooked it through the first hook and...what a minute.

Take a closer look:



Notice anything missing? No orifice! Nada, niete, none. This was quite baffling to me. There was no evidence that an orifice once existed. It simply never was. Like any good 21st Century spinner, I immediately sent a note to my spinning email list and what I learned has just blown my mind. Apparently, and are you sitting down for this? Apparently, there was a trend popular in the 1950s and 60s for people to buy purely decorative spinning wheels to put in their houses. That's right, spinning wheels that closely resembled the real thing but don't actually work. And all evidence points to this being one of those. What is maddening is that it is thisclose to really functioning.

So much for my good samaritan impulses. Although I also learned in my research that there is someone who has figured out a way to retrofit a working flywheel and bobbin (with orifice) onto these...er...items, I feel my investment in this one is finished. I listed it on freecycle and almost immediately got a response from someone who is sure they can make it work. (I was really clear that it was non-functioning).

Hope springs eternal.

May Day Schedule

1. Finn and Lucy go to gymnastic/dance class

2. Walk to park

3. Make flower garlands

4. Maypole dance.

We are actually celebrating our May Day with a maypole dance. It brings to mind one of my all-time favorite movies, The Wicker Man (1973 version, please).



The '70s were great...