The White Stuff

Amazing scenes in the south-west of England recently - the deepest snow for 18 years, so the Met Office tells us. Understandably, since this is a very unusual state of affairs for us, the whole country was unprepared. (I was idly wondering, when watching a news report featuring people complaining about how badly prepared the councils were, whether they themselves had got grit and salt for their front paths? No?) We are more fortunate than most, because we do have the 4x4; but we also have to get out there to do the animals, no matter what.

The sheep are doing very, very well in the snow, to my surprise. I think they would definitely prefer to have this sort of weather than the mud and rain of recent winters. They need to be fed hay, although they are perfectly capable of finding grass under the snow - just not very much of it. Even Alfie, no fan of frosty weather on the whole, is a lot less cross about it than he was around New Year.


Here are Alfie (on the right) and Lulu, waiting for Foz to feed them. They always like a bit of a scratch first. You can see that Alf has snow on his back; he's so well insulated that it just won't melt. He is toasty warm under all that fleece (and the way you tell that is to feel right up between his hind legs - if he's warm up there, then he's fine. It's considerate to make sure your hand isn't freezing cold if you do that, though.)


Here's Alfie at speed, galloping through the snow to get to a bucket of food which he hadn't previously noticed. I love the way all the snow is being kicked up as he goes.


This is Magda, our oldest ewe (not that old, at 5, but still, we must respect her seniority!) She's really happy at the moment, enjoying the snow and loving the attention she's getting. Even if you know nothing about sheep at all, I think it's possible to see from her expression that she's really enjoying that scratch from Foz.

I'm afraid there has been little time for spinning, but I do have some lovely new yarn up on Etsy. Hopefully it will find new homes soon!

Hurrah!

Want these? www.cotswoldpurls.etsy.com

A first go at combing

I have to admit, I just don't know what equipment I own. Having had a rummage in my workroom, I recalled that I had bought a pair of tiny wool combs, single pitch ones (i.e. with only one row of tines) and very small, but nevertheless, they are combs. Here they are:

There's nothing on this photo to give them scale, but they're quite small, especially in comparison to the huge wool combs of the past. But still, they give me an opportunity to try out the technique.

So firstly, I needed to wash some fleece. I know from experience that washing Cotswold fleece can be tricky, but I also know that if one separates the locks beforehand, and lies them in a roasting tin (a roasting tin which, I hasten to add, will never be used for food...!), this is easier. So I use some gentle detergent, and some hand-hot water, then put the tin on the hob on a low heat, and very gently heat for about 20 minutes or so. I then let the water cool down on its own, to about blood temperature, then drain the fleece, and then gently pour on rinse water of about the same temperature. No rubbing, no boiling water to be put onto the fleece, no stirring the water; this way, we hope that we won't get felt. The fleece I used is one I've had for a while - it belonged to Trixie, a Cotswold sheep who is owned by Fiona. It's a nice fleece, and very lustrous and creamy white.

So once the fleece is nice and clean, it needs to be dried, which I did by sticking it over an airer, over the bath, overnight. The next stage seems a little weird. You need to put back some of the grease which has been taken out by the washing. To do this, I spray the fleece locks with a mixture of half-and-half olive oil and water, put into a spray bottle and shaken thoroughly to mix. Now, I know that spinners are divided about whether to wash fleece or not. I never used to do so, but now I nearly always do. Every authority I have consulted about wool combing reckons that it's essential to wash the fleece first, and furthermore that when it was done on a huge scale in the past, clean fleece was always used. In my own experiments, I've realised that if you don't get the fleece fully clean, and then try to create a tightly wound, very fine thread, you will never get that thread clean. I have had some very disappointing yarns which are still quite sticky from having lanolin still on them. As another experiment, I tried combing wool first without the olive oil and water spray, and then with it - and it's sooo much easier with the spray.

So, I have clean, dry, and now sprayed-with-olive-oil-and-water fleece. The next thing to do is to set the combs up. I think these combs are designed to be hand held, but I decided to put one of them into a vice, and clamp it to the table. This was after I nearly did myself a mischief with the tines - they are very sharp.
The next thing to do is to load some locks onto the comb. With the big combs, you can apparently load them to half the depth of the tines, but that is far too much for these little ones. I put two layers of locks onto the comb held in the vice.

You then rotate the comb through 90 degrees, so the teeth point to the right (for right-handers - for left handers I should think it'd be more convenient to have them pointing the other way). The second comb then comes into play. I have to confess at this point that I was taking these photos on my own, and wielding a comb with one hand and a camera with the other was Not Easy. So I'll have to describe what happens. The comb in your hand describes a sort of circular motion, from above to below. The tines just tickle the ends of the locks on the way past, at least to start off with. Some fleece will transfer from the fixed comb to the one in your hand. This is what we want to have happen. You carry on with this combing until most of the fleece on the fixed comb has gone onto the one in your hand. Then, you change the motion of the hand held comb. Instead of going in a circular motion from above to below, it swings from right to left, transferring the fleece back onto the fixed comb.

Eventually, you'll be left with a wild, combed out mass of fleece on your fixed comb, thus:

and a mess of little noils and short bits on the comb in your hand, thus (which you discard, or else keep for carding):


The next bit definitely needed two hands. Rotate the comb in the vice so that its teeth are pointing upwards again. Then, form the mass of fibre on it into a sort of goatee beard shape, and you'll find that you can slowly draw off a continuous stream of fibre; this is called a sliver. Don't take any short pieces of fibre, or indeed any bits with nasty noily bits in. You can then 'plank' the sliver, which is where you lie a couple of feet of it onto a table, break that piece off, and then lie another piece on top of it, breaking that off, and repeating until you have something like this:

You then load it back onto the fixed comb, and go through the combing process again. This won't take quite so long. I think that, if you were using combs with more than one row of tines, this process would remove even more of the short fibres - the point of this exercise is to only use the long ones, and to get them all going in the same direction. I found it's all pretty flyaway at this point, and getting it to stay on the comb was a bit of a challenge at times.

So, the next process is to get that mass of fibre off there, and for this you need a diz. Now, I am not a great one for making equipment, but I did make my own diz - it's the bottom of a plastic bottle, with a hole punched into it. The piece of plastic I used is concave - this is important. Here's the diz:


Now, you rotate the fixed comb back so that its tines are pointing upwards, and you create the little goatee beard sorta thang.


Then, poke the point of the goatee beard through the hole in the centre of the diz - with the concave side pointing away from you, so it is as if the diz becomes a funnel. You can then draw off a continuous stream of fibre again, in a controlled manner. This is really hard to describe, and I suggest that if you want to see this done, you should try searching on YouTube - there are several really good videos of this being done.
Not a terribly clear picture, but never mind.

Once you've removed most of the fibre (and again, don't worry about the horrible short noily bits, leave them on the comb), you have a thing called a top. You can then wind it into a bird's nest sort of arrangement, and put it to one side for spinning.

Now, I've got to say at this point that I worked all this out by using Peter Teal's book, which I mentioned in my last post (and in fact it's the definitive work, if you're interested in wool combing it's definitely worth getting hold of) and the instructional videos I found on the internet. So, I'm no expert, but I have to say that this wasn't difficult to do. I think you need to have a bit of a feel for what the wool is going to do, especially when you are making the sliver or the top, but that's very like hand spinning, so if you can do that, you can probably do this.

I'll post about the actual spinning in a few days. I have to say, though, that I've really enjoyed this, and I am definitely intending to get some big combs. These little ones are good, but they don't manage very much fibre at one time - the big combs are capable of doing a lot more.

Happy New Year

Well, a happy 2009 to you! Here's a picture which I meant to post at Christmas, but didn't:

Poor Alfie, his dignity is just eroded more and more. He's very philosophical about it though.

Anyway, enough tormenting of innocent creatures. I have a Project which I am thinking of starting. I haven't really been thinking much about my own personal projects over the last few months, because I've been too busy. This, however, might well have been a bad idea, because those personal projects are the engine-house of what I do. They're where I play, where I work things out, where I just do the things I'm interested in, and of course I tend to find that they lead me down useful paths as well. Now, I have two talks to give in the early part of this year, one next month and one in March, and I want to have a Major Project to discuss for them.

As you know, I'm interested in the historical side of both the Cotswold sheep and the craft of hand spinning. One of my goals for having the flock of sheep has been that I wanted to gain a personal understanding and experience of all the processes which are involved in going from fibre to finished object, both in the modern setting and as they would have been done in the heyday of the breed, and I think I have tackled that pretty well so far. Mostly. I have delivered lambs, I have done routine and non-routine shepherding tasks. I know enough about shearing to be completely OK about that fact that I will never, ever use hand shears (like big scissors, basically) to shear my sheep - too much like hard work, takes a stress-inducing long time to do, doesn't do such a good job in the hands of a beginner. I can sort fleece, assess it, send it to the mill and do creative things when it comes back. I am a pretty expert hand spinner by now too. But there's one big process that I know little about, which is wool combing, and it's that which I intend to master this year.

Wool combing is a process particularly suited to the long locks of Cotswold fleece. It enables the spinner to create a yarn which is flat, shiny and hard-wearing; one in which all the fibres lie parallel (known as worsted), rather than one in which they are jumbled (known as woollen). It's not a particularly common skill today; most fleeces are prepared by carding, which is the way of preparing for woollen spinning. The main source these days for finding out about wool combing is the outstanding book by Peter Teal, Hand Woolcombing And Spinning. There are also lots of very informative videos on places like You-Tube (try surfing to find them, they are many and various).

So, here's the plan. I intend to purchase a pair of wool combs, probably for mondo cash (they are beautiful things, and craftsman-made, and of course as a craftsperson myself, I do not begrudge paying someone to make some for me), and learn by experimentation how to use them. I will then perfect my worsted spinning (I have done some, but not very much), and create a lace cardigan from the resultant wool, of my own design. I doubt I'll have it done by the first talk, but it will certainly give me something to talk about. I also intend to blog about this, how I'm doing it and what I'm finding out.

First step is buying the combs. I've emailed a couple of vendors, so I'm on the way...

I seem to have lost something

I'm not entirely sure whether turning the house inside out, looking into my pockets, under the sofa, or in the back of the car, will entirely help with rediscovering my lost thing. This thing is, of course, most of the start of November. I mean, what happened? How did this occur? A couple of days ago, it was 22nd October. Now, it's 13th November. This is just patently unjust! I want those days back.

It's particularly important because, coming up this weekend, we have the Knitting and Spinning weekend at Lower Shaw Farm, in Swindon. Preparation has been going on for a while, and I'm now really looking forward to it. Lower Shaw Farm is such a lovely place, a friendly and calm learning environment where people can hang out, learn new crafts, make new friends and meet old ones, and eat wonderful food. We have got games to play, lovely raw materials to use, and beautiful tools to work with. Full report after the weekend, I hope.

Goodbye Molly

Sadly, Molly didn't make it. Her condition really deteriorated during Thursday night and Friday, and our vet put her to sleep on Friday night. She waited until Foz returned from Edinburgh, and was delighted to see him, but after that she really went downhill. She spent most of her last few hours eating little tiny bits of chopped up carrot, then resting from the effort with her head either on Foz's lap, or resting against him as he sat with her. Our vet gave her an overdose of sedative, and she drifted off very peacefully and with dignity. The barn seems very empty without her. I'm surprised at how gutted I am to lose her. It's always part of shepherding, that you will lose sheep. Cotswolds are tough customers, and don't deserve the reputation sheep have of dying easily, but they're still mortal. We lost another well-loved ewe, Tilly, earlier in the year, which was very sad, but losing Molly feels much worse.

Probably due to the stress of the last week, I have gone down with the cold that I could feel prowling round the edges of my immune system, so I am at home right now feeling pretty wretched. Edward, our vet, said that he felt Molly had left behind a real legacy, because she had been one of the original ewes we bought, and had been the friendliest, right from the word go. We now want to make sure that we use that legacy in the best possible way, so we're thinking of how to take the flock forwards from here. It could have been easy to have been discouraged, but we are determined to pick ourselves up and carry on.

A Quick Molly Update

Molly is still hanging on in there, although she had a bad day yesterday. She got stuck on her side at some point during the night, and I found her exhausted and disorientated the next morning. She seemed to recover OK, but her energy levels seemed to crash during the afternoon, and by the evening she was very weak. I phoned the vet, and asked him to come out, with the unspoken understanding that he might have to put her to sleep. Meanwhile, I fed her some sugar beet pulp, which is easily digested and a good energy giving food, and she perked up. The vet has changed her homeopathic remedy, and I really think that she seems to be responding to it. She seems somehow different this morning, and I feel that she may have some more muscle tone in her hind legs. Maybe yesterday's crisis was her hitting rock bottom? Who knows. I'll keep you posted.