Somebody Set Up Fibershed Virginia, Please

     I've been talking to shepherds who raise fibre and small business owners who serve fibre artists, and I think there is a need in Virginia for a non-profit or a business to help connect sellers and buyers, and support both.  Have a look at Fibershed's Producer Program and their publicity work and education events.  I wish someone would set up an affiliate Fibershed here.  There is a Fibershed affiliate that covers part of Virginia but I've heard it does not have a producer program, only an education program.
     I think there is consumer demand for textile products that are exceptionally beautiful and functional, raised humanely, produced and delivered in an environmentally-friendly way, presented so that the customer can connect emotionally with the producer, and sold in a way that makes it easy for the customer to buy and use the product.  It probably means e-commerce and in-person sales at public markets.
     Additionally, the products and services should let people be themselves but more so, in an area they deem important to them personally.  I've seen wool let people be generous, be connected with peers, be connected with charismatic stars, show love to family, show their fandom or taste or profession, be a nature lover, be a mentor, be a planner, be a collector, be a savvy shopper, be thrifty, be extravagant or self-indulgent, be a patron, be interesting, and (of course) be a maker.  And in some cases, whatever their thing was, that was their life.  Honestly.  Marry that with a product of remarkable beauty from a seller they know, like, and trust, and people quit caring about the price tag and just buy.
     E-commerce can be tough for producers to arrange.  In my shopping experience, shepherds and mills are open for business but often it is difficult to see and buy their current stock of goods and services.  Right now as a customer you have to be in the know and making a real effort.  Producers will put up a static webpage (often outdated, saying things like "we're really excited about the sheep shearer coming in Spring 2014!") and expect customers to phone them and inquire.  It's like asking people to click.  Chances are they won't.  Or they are focussed on selling breeding stock or milling services, and missing the person who wants to buy yarn or a fleece.  Also, most fiber websites have poor graphic design.  In contrast, the Fibershed website is gorgeous.  Fibre buyers are highly attuned to colour and design.
     Production challenges are an issue that the Northern California Fibershed supports.  I don't know if that is so much of a need in Virginia in the sense of wool going to waste because no one is there to mill it like in Northern California.  Money is leaving the region: I know two or three Virginia-based yarn merchants who send their wool out of state for milling, and I know of another yarn merchant that does its own milling but sends materials out of state for washing.  I once heard from a shepherd who was having trouble finding breeding stock for a rare breed.
     Customer education is needed.  I believe there are buyers out there willing to pay for beautiful textiles they can feel good about, who have no clue what to ask for, how to ask, where to ask, or how much to pay.  Or even that these things exist.  In my experience demonstrating handspinning in public, they have the most basic of questions.  Ten years ago I was like them myself.  A middleman could help.  In the Northern California Fibershed, they've been able to connect some pretty big corporate clients with producers.
     There is also an appetite for education from sophisticated buyers and from producers.  I know handspinners and weavers that travel out of state to hear speakers and take workshops, and they buy books and DVDs.  Rita Buchanan (A Weaver's Garden) is the only fibre arts author I know that wrote in Virginia.  Oh, and Max Hamrick (Organic Fiber Dyeing: The Colonial Williamsburg Method).  Equipment and materials too, the majority of the stuff used by the dozens of handspinners, weavers, dyers, and knitters I know comes from out of state.  And I see a lot of money being spent, these people have disposable income and time.  I can think of one nationally-known manufacturer of equipment in Virginia, Strauch Fiber Equipment Co.
     Some of the functions of such an organization are covered in our region by local guilds, fibre festivals, and breed-specific sheep breeder associations and the Virginia Sheep Producers Association.  Other resources include

• the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services' Virginia Grown program 
• the Virginia Small Business Development Center (SBDC) Network
• local chapters of SCORE (Service Corps of Retired Executives), which provides business mentoring
• the Retail Merchants association (RMA) in Richmond
• Business First Greater Richmond
• Thrive Mentor Network at the Greater Richmond Small Business Development Center
• your city or county economic development office or finance office
• your Chamber of Commerce
• U.S. Small Business Administration
• IRS Small Business and Self-Employed Tax Center
• Virginia Cooperative Extension
• Local Harvest, a national e-commerce platform for agricultural products
• Agrilicious, which plans to start a national e-commerce platform for agricultural products
• Etsy, an international e-commerce platform for handmade items, vintage items, and supplies
• Ravelry, which sells advertising placements to reach knitters
• the MidAtlantic Fiber Association (MAFA), for grants
• the Virginia Commission for the Arts, for grants

     What actions can you take, assuming you agree but you're not going to set up Fibershed Virginia yourself?  Write to VDACS to tell them about the Fibershed model, say you think there is an underserved market in Virginia, and tell them specific stories of why this is true.  Tell them why it's important, relating this to their mandates for conservation, economic development, etc.
     Wear beautiful traceable textiles in your daily life, and be prepared to do show and tell and make referrals to your sources.  Throw some work their way.  Distribute brochures for fibre festivals.  Spin yarn, knit, or weave in public.
     Talk to young people about the possibility of finding work in the fibre arts, and about the small scale production equipment available such as mechanized carding machines, e-spinners, knitting machines, floor looms, and mini mills from a company like Belfast Mini Mills.  Consider a Kickstarter campaign to buy a young person equipment and training to set them up in business.  Connect young people who need work experience with fibre small businesses who need services like graphic design, web design, photography, marketing, and social media tutorials.
     Send shepherds encouraging notes, maybe with photographs of them at events that they can use for publicity, and ask them how it's going.  Tell personal fibre stories on social media.  Help a guild or an arts centre apply for a grant.  Refurbish old wheels and looms to keep them in service.  Run a seminar or workshop for the public to show them the possibilities of fibre arts.  Develop and publish educational materials like handouts or booklets.  Pray (or whatever you do instead of praying) for take-charge people to get involved and carry through.  I'm sure you'll think of something.  Thanks.
     I plan to order some cloth reusable shopping bags to dye with indigo, walnut, and madder, to use as a conversation starter when I shop.  I plan to demonstrate handspinning at a farmers' market next weekend, knit in public for WWKIP day the week after, and demonstrate either handspinning or språng at a museum the week after that.
     And you?

Rukinlapa

A foreign word or phrase can mean all the difference to finding out information about fibre arts tools.

Take for example rukinlapa for distaff in Finnish and ручная прялка (ruchnaya pryalka) for distaff in Russian.  Run them through online image searches.  You'll get some unrelated results but mostly you'll see bat-shaped distaffs with carved designs.  Imagine a man carving one for his sweetie back in the day.

The search results are a lot more satisfying than results with the other Russian word I found last month for this sort of distaff, lopastka, which is more like the word blade, shoulder blade or trowel blade.

There's a china pattern called Rukinlapa by Raija Uosikkinen‏ based on these distaffs' shape and carving designs.

Another Old Believer Belt Tool Sighting

I spotted a photo of another weaver-tensioned cloth beam used by a weaver in an Old Believer community in Oregon to weave belts with tablets.  It looks cut and carved from a single piece of wood, and more irregular in shape than the ones I had made after the original I saw in the film Old Believers but otherwise very much the same.

Fibre Prep, Spinning, and Nalbinding Videos from Russia

I came across some videos from Russia about nalbinding.  Both sources refer to it as knitting with one needle.

"Вязание одной иглой," [trans. knitting with one needle] http://kizhi.karelia.ru/culture/crafts/vyazanie-odnoj-igloj.

"Marina Korshakova (Center for Traditional Crafts, Petrozavodsk) shows knitting on one needle technique," www.kareliancraft.com/en/crafts/4026/.

Both state that hunters and woodsmen would make their own mittens.  I got that in the printed description on the first webpage using an online translator and in the narration in the second webpage's video.  Also, both state that horsehair was incorporated for durability.  I've heard elsewhere that horsehair and sheep's kemp (guard hairs) were used in mittens like this because they did not soak up water like wool did.

On the Karelian Craft webpage, there is another video about combing wool and spinning with a spindle.  The presenter calls spinning clockwise (Z twist) as "along with the sun," and spinning counterclockwise (S twist) as "against it."

At the 7:30 mark, Korshakova refers to a rustic L-shaped style of distaff this way, "Of course you have seen old women in villages spinning.  This distaff," and she motions with her left hand from shoulder height downward to the hip and then in toward her body indicating the position, size, and shape of the distaff, "was made from a whole tree trunk from a root, to put it on a bench, sit on it, make it comfortable."

I wonder if they used this part of the tree because it was durable.  I like to know how things were done and why things were done.

I've heard about this sort of rustic design in one other source: The University of Innsbruck's article about spindle typology in the entry for Russia, www.uibk.ac.at/urgeschichte/projekte_forschung/abt/spindeltypologie/russia.html.  To quote, "A traditional Russian distaff is L-shaped and consists of two elements: the lopastka or blade, a vertical panel with wide flat top to which the bundle of flax or wool, called kudel is fixed, and the dontse, or base, a horizontal oar-shaped board on which the spinner sits and stabilizes the structure with the weight of her body. Sometimes the distaff is carved from a single piece of wood - a tree stump with a root protruding at a right angle.  In some areas of Russia the upper part of the blade has the shape of a comb, and the kudel was mounted on the teeth."  There are photographs and a detail from a piece of 19th century art, though not of the whole tree trunk style of disaff from what I can see.

Similarly, a Doukhobor spinning board forms a L-shape with its detachable interchangable pieces such as a forked distaff, post for paddle combs, and flax combs.  This setup is of Russian origin as well.  It's difficult to see in this photo taken at the Doukhobor Discovery Centre in Castlegar, B.C., but the flax comb held by the mannequin is toothed.

Stack of Stick Shuttles for Card Weaving

My father made me stick shuttles for card (tablet) weaving.  Now I just have to find ten friends who want to join me, heh.

The wood is maple, from Vancouver Island, Canada.

ETA: My father says I had a hand in the stick shuttles too.

"I Had No Idea How Much Emotion I Could Feel Over These Things"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqmiA1d8dZQ

"Rescuing a Dying Art"

Jennifer Gaudet of Jennifer's Hamam, interviewed by Kimberley Strathearn about rescuing looms in Turkey and re-employing skilled production weavers.  

According to the Jennifer's Hamam website, their Turkish bath towels can be expected to last twenty years, much longer than factory-made towels, because the cloth is constructed using shuttles.  I find it interesting when people point out a link between structure and functional performance.

In the article "Towels Fit for a Sultan," Today's Zaman, December 8, 2010, http://www.todayszaman.com/news-229022-towels-fit-for-a-sultan.html, Gaudet talks about the weavers, their equipment and how they work.  She says, "It takes two to six days to weave one big 1.8 kilogram towel and one to three weeks to weave a bathrobe."

You can find videos of the weavers in action through the Jennifer's Hamam Facebook page.  They use fly shuttles, their weaving is rapid and noisy with a rhythm.  The looms are similar to the looms in the video of Harris tweed weavers I linked to in a previous post.

If I Went Wool Gathering, I'd Need a Basket

Harold B. Burnham and Dorothy k. Burnham's Keep Me Warm One Night: Early Handweaving in Eastern Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972) p. 25 shows a wool basket from Ontario in the early 1800s.  It is "made of willow withes in the shape of a rugby ball" which, if your school didn't have a team and you've never seen one, is like a chubby football.  The basket is 50 cm  (19.7 inches) long with a diameter of 32 cm (12.6 inches).  There is a square hole in the top that measures perhaps as wide as a third of the total length, perhaps a little more.

I assume that compared to a typical open-topped basket, this basket has the advantage of keeping the wool inside and not snagged by branches or borne away by wind.  I find the design attractive.

The authors note "this type of basket is well known in Scotland, and another smaller example has been seen in Cape Breton (Mackley Collection)....Baskets of this type were also used when teasing wool."

John Mercer's The Spinner's Workshop: A Social History and Practical Guide (Dorchester: Prism, 1978) p. 80 refers to the same type of basket but only in the context of preparing wool with hand cards: "The Highland Scots kept their rolagan [rolags] in a special container, the mudag; unaccountably oval, like a rugby ball, it had a hole in the centre of its side for the passage of the wool."

The shape makes more sense tucked under the arm out in the fields than it does resting on the floor indoors.

J. Young

Judith Buxton's Selected Canadian Spinning Wheels in Perspective: An Analytical Approach (Hull: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 1992) refers on page 154 to a family of chair makers in Lunenburg, NS that also made spinning wheels under the names J. Young and F. Young.

When I visited the Knaut-Rhuland House museum in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia last year, there was a spinning wheel in the front room marked J. Young.  Makes it a very local product.

Tablet-woven Hearts and New Belt Tools

Happy Distaff Day!

I have been card (tablet) weaving four inch long samples for enclosure in a weaving guild newsletter.  The jumbled pile in the photo shows two warps that started out about four metres long each.  I have another warp to go.

The pieces are mostly pink with a repeated motif in off-white that is supposed to look like a heart.  As I wrote in my observations of the Jerusalem Garter museum piece, when you thread alternately one card S and the other Z across the pack of cards you get little chevrons.  The white chevrons stand out against the pink chevrons.

The cloth beam is new.  My father looked at the cloth beam I'd had custom made for myself this past spring and he told me that by specifying the tool be made all in one piece, I had created spots where the grain of the wood could split.  I took the specs from a tool used for making belts by a weaver named Feodora Seledkova in an old documentary film and I didn't give any thought to the woodgrain.

Made sense when he pointed it out, and was a bit of a concern given the amount of pull the tool has to stand up to.  I secure the far end of the warp to an immovable object, tuck the cloth beam's closer prongs into a sash or belt loops at my waist, and lean back when beating down the warp to create the weft-faced cloth.  At the last guild meeting, I tied the warp to a cart holding a stack of folding tables, the heaviest thing in the room.  I forgot the cart was on wheels.  A couple of friends were watching me weave and without telling me (until after) they leaned on the cart quite hard to counter my pull and keep the cart in place.

My dad made me a dozen new cloth beams with the grain of the middle pieces running perpendicular to the long pieces and Robertson screws holding the three pieces together.  My dad would particularly like you to notice the Robertson screws, as they are very Canadian.  Most of the cloth beams are made of maple from trees that grew on Vancouver Island and if memory serves the darker wood is local alder.

ETA: directions for making cloth beams are in a post here.

Doukhobor Discovery Centre

Went to the Kootenay Doukhobor Historical Society's Doukhobor Discovery Centre in Castlegar, B.C., Canada in search of exhibited tools and textiles.  Found them.

The Doukhobor are a people group that immigrated to Canada from Russia in 1899.  For decades they lived communally and met almost all of their own textile needs themselves.  I find it impressive what they got done.

This is a long blog post.  I will start out with some clothes, go on to fibre arts tools for processing, spinning, and weaving, and then finish with examples of woven textiles.

First, something not strictly a textile: a sheepskin coat.  If you remember your Canadian post-Confederation history, Laurier's Minister of the Interior Clifford Sifton went against public expectation that settlers in the Prairie provinces would preferably come from Britain and places like it.  If they could do agriculture, they were in.  He said, "I think that a stalwart peasant in a sheepskin coat, born on the soil, whose forefathers have been farmers for ten generations, with a stout wife and a half-dozen children, is good quality."

I'm guessing that the sheepskin coat came from an early period, as later the community adopted vegetarianism right down to their shoes.  There are quite a few pairs of shoes made of cordage on display.  There's a slip-on pair that is very coarse and bristly.  This pair is made with particularly fine materials.

Here's a spinning wheel.  There are several, and they looked very similar to each other.  Note that the maiden supporting the orifice is considerably thicker than the other maiden, a design I hadn't seen before.  Burnham's Unlike the Lilies: Doukhobor Textile Traditions in Canada states that the community received gifts of spinning wheels from the Quakers and the Canadian Council of Women, but since Burnham identifies this style of wheel as Russian, the one below could be imported.  Most wheels on display were of this design.  Burnham believes the gifts of wheels explain why there is rare evidence (one photograph and one memory from interviewees) for the use of hand spindles.

I found a spindle on display.

weft beater, spindle, tool for pressing linen

Here are fibre preparation and weaving tools: paddle combs bottom left and at top, bobbins, flax comb-type distaffs and matching small combs, boat shuttles, hand cards, and pulleys from a loom.  I think the proportions and the curve detail on the flax combs in the middle are beautiful, and I really wish these were commercially available.  Want to know how much?  Earlier this year I gave information about flax combs and distaffs to three different professional fibre arts tool makers in hopes they would consider adding these items to their line.  Every other tool on the table you can get new.  I know this makes sense given how many people weave and comb and card wool compared to how few work with flax, but the heart knows no reason.

The long stem of the flax distaff fits into the same sort of board that supports paddle combs for wool, holding the fibre at convenient height first to comb the fibre out then to draw the fibre off for spinning.

Board and post supporting paddle combs set in distaff position

There are two looms on display, a horizontal loom with treadles and an upright tapestry loom.  The rough construction is interesting.  Makes you feel like anyone who's handy enough could have a loom, not just folks with hundreds or thousands of dollars to buy one.  See how the shafts are made of bowed wood.  See how a metal bracket braces the top corner of the tapestry loom.  Also of note, at the right side of the horizontal loom on the floor is another board for holding combs or distaffs, one that I think has nicer lines than the one in the photo above.

Did you notice, on the tableful of tools, that underneath was a linen tablecloth?  There are handspun handwoven linen cloths everywhere in the museum.  The rug on the wall is one of many as well, and there are not only weft-faced tapestry rugs but pile rugs.

Hemp camel bags, probably purchased in Russia

drum carder

Thanks to curator Netta Zeberoff who gave me permission to post these photos.

Knaut-Rhuland House in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia

What do you do when you go to a designated world heritage site in a really old part of Canada?  Go looking around town for evidence of handspinning.

I found it at the Knaut-Rhuland House museum in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia.

The textile room at the back holds a comprehensive collection of tools and supplies that museum interpreters must find well-suited to teaching the public about hand methods of fabric production.  There is a great wheel with bat head, loom, inkle loom, warping board, spinning wheel, line flax, baskets of wool, basket of spindles and roving, swift, skein winder, hand cards for wool, handwoven fabric samples, a crude Turkish spindle made from twigs, and an enormous rustic forked distaff whose practicality I question.  I was interested the line flax, of course, but sadly wasn't able to find out where the flax came from.

bat head on great wheel

The Saxony spinning wheel had paint on the wood to highlight its turned details, a touch I've read is characteristic of wheels from French-speaking cultures in North America.  There was a similar wheel in the front room.

decorative paint on spinning wheel; line flax

Upstairs were the beginnings of socks on double pointed needles.

Also upstairs was a very old set of table linen labeled as a flax linen centre and serviettes.  (Canadians say serviettes, Americans say napkins.  I remember my Canadian-born grandmother once defended the word serviette, clinching her argument with the fact that napkins, nappies, go on babies' bottoms.)  The set was made locally by hand at every stage from flax seed planted by a settler who came to the area in the mid-1700s.  I won't post a photo of the linens because they are from a private collection on loan to the museum, but I will describe the workmanship.  The material is fine, even, and smooth.  Extensive embellishment was done in cutwork; that is, small holes were cut out in patterns and the edges bound with embroidery in the shape of leaves and flowers.  Vines and blossoms are embroidered on the solid parts.  I can't imagine anyone daring to wipe a greasy mouth with one of those serviettes.

In the narrow garden around the house were small sprouts, identified by the museum worker as flax, as well as dye plants at the back.

Old Believers' Belt Tool

A blog can get to be a series of disjointed and drawn-out story installments, yes?

This past December, I saw a film called Old Believers and worked on paper to reverse engineer a fibre arts tool I saw used in the film.  Here's the update: Mike King of the Spanish Peacock worked from my drawing and produced a replica of the tool.

I have no idea what to call it, so I say belt tool for want of a better name.  In the film, weaver Feodora Seledkova uses hers to secure the near end of a warp as she weaves a card-woven (tablet-woven) belt.  She tucks the tool into the sash at her waist.  The tool acts as a tiny cloth beam.

I thought I'd need a sash like Seledkova's to hold the tool in place at my waist.  However, I find I can secure the ends by slotting them through the front belt loops on my jeans, so there's no need to make a sash.  I can go straight to weaving.

Bookmarks.  I think I just wove some skinny bookmarks.

At first I turned the cards in one direction but that caused the fabric to corkscrew.  Reversing the direction of the cards every four turns creates a flat woven band.  It's too bad, because the selvedge is not nearly as firm or even with that method.

ETA: I have posted directions on how to make a belt tool here.

Antler Whorls from Crossman Crafts

Here is my new drop spindle from Crossman Crafts in the U.K.  The whorl is small, an inch and a half, and is made from naturally-shed deer antler from Scotland.  The wood is English boxwood.

Spindles with antler are uncommon and I feel fortunate to have one.  To the left you can see another antler whorl, smaller and in conical shape.  I've worn that one as a pendant.  The exposure in the photo doesn't do justice to antler's slightly mottled surface.

The large and small whorls were stock items but the shaft and hook were made to order.  Initially I gave completely wrong specs to Peter Crossman due to a math error I made and he graciously reworked the piece when I realized.

As always, I note on the blog whenever I receive an unsolicited gift from a business so that you can know what could be influencing what I write.  Some beads and some pieces of taffy turned up in the parcel.

Hopefully it goes without saying that any complimentary parcel enclosure from anywhere is done solely at the discretion of the business owner and should not be expected as ordinary or anyone's due?

The beads are half-scale replicas of beads from the Tudor shipwreck the Mary Rose, which is in Portsmouth, England, same as Crossman Crafts.

Buy Spindles with Canadian Tire Money?!?

ACME Fibres takes Canadian Tire "money."*  And sells drop spindles from Houndesign of Vancouver.  Marvelous.  I'm not sure which is better, but I know which makes me laugh.


*a chain store's rewards program whose "money" is a pop culture institution in Canada

Make a Distaff for Distaff Day

In case you still have a tree hanging around and want to know how to make a bird cage-style distaff to celebrate Distaff Day, I found directions:

Many distaffs throughout Canada were made by taking the upper tip of a spruce or fir tree, stripping it clean, and tying the tips of the branches together to form a cage over which the prepared flax could be loosely tied.  

-Burnham and Burnham, Keep Me Warm One Night: Early Handweaving in Eastern Canada

I've never used a distaff.  I rarely ever see them.  I've seen a few wrist distaffs and the kind of distaff that looks like a pole.

One of the maddening things about getting your information from books is that an author can leave so much out.  I have only the foggiest idea how much of the tree tip you use and what the final dimensions should be.

Going by one of the plates on the same page, and judging by the relative size of the given wheel diameter, I am going to guess that the bird cage distaff pictured is 20 cm from the base of the bent wood pieces to the tips where they cross.  This does not include the rest of the upright (below the "cage") which fits into the spinning wheel.

The proportion between that 20 cm of height and the widest point of the ballooning bent wood pieces looks to be about phi, or the golden ratio of 1:1.618, the height being the longer measurement.  I should say that the plate shows a rather refined looking wheel and distaff; the upright of the distaff is made of turned wood, not the tip of a tree trunk.  I should also say that Burnham and Burnham do not call it a bird cage distaff, that is a name I have seen used elsewhere.

Doukhobor Fiber Tools

In my misspent youth, during my free time at university, I holed up in a carrel with a panoramic view of Georgia Strait and the snow-topped Coast mountains, a carrel within arm's reach of all the library's back issues of Harrowsmith magazine, and there I sat and read every single one.

There was an article about a certain plant, one that I will not name so that this post won't get picked up on search engines for the wrong reasons.  Canada had banned cultivation of this plant decades before.  If I'm not mistaken, you can grow the fiber-producing variety of this plant now in Canada if you have a permit and are prepared for scrutiny from the Mounties (though it's still banned in the U.S.) but at the time the article was published, you couldn't.  The writer investigated the uses of the plant for fiber as well as the impacts and implications of the ban.  One interview was with a Doukhobor woman who had kept for years a very durable set of men's clothing.  If I remember correctly, it was a suit.  Her family or her community had made the clothes from scratch out of the plant material back in the days when cultivation was legal and commonplace.

I was terribly impressed to know that any people group in the twentieth century had once had the skills to make clothes starting with raw materials.  Not only that, but nice clothes.  The article made me see the Doukhobors in a different light than what our high school Social Studies books had presented.

I recently got the book Unlike the Lilies: Doukhobor Textile Traditions in Canada by Dorothy K. Burnham.

I like to see what fiber tools and materials have been used throughout history, especially in folk culture, to meet people's need for clothes, bedding, and so on.  Lets me delude myself into imagining I could make the tools and raise the fiber too.

The book shows a Tartar wool comb, which was new to me.  Normally when I use a set of wool combs I like to clamp one down so I don't have to brace one against the pull of the other.  A tartar wool comb stays stationary without a clamp.  Two rows of tines are set in a block of wood attached to the top of a triangle of wood, the peak of which is made from two boards, and the base of which is a long board that sticks out to one side or to either side depending on the model.  You sit on the board and let gravity hold the comb in place.  Only one comb was used and the wool was pulled through the tines by hand.

I was interested to see retted flax stalks being broken with a pestle in a large mortar made of a log.  They had regular flax brakes too, but no scutching boards: they would whip the stems up and down across a sawhorse instead.  The flax combs were made of thin wooden boards, very different from the metal hackles I usually see in vintage or reproduction flax tools, and these combs had only one row of teeth.  When harvesting the flax, a hammer was used to remove seed heads by beating them; the flax was not pulled through a more usual ripple, which looks like a rake and does the same job as the hammer except by pulling the seed heads off.

Burnham confirms some facts about flax processing I've read before, such as getting the finest flax by sowing thickly, harvesting before the seeds ripen, and using the dew retting method instead of the water method.


ETA: see also another post with photos from a museum visit http://thesojourningspinner.blogspot.com/2011/11/doukhobor-discovery-centre.html

Commodities and Currencies

Happy Buy Nothing Day!  Or Black Friday, if you prefer.

The price of cotton has jumped recently, and anytime a commodity changes you can reasonably expect a change in the price of finished goods, clothes in this case.  I am interested to see what sort of impact this will have, whether anyone will turn to other fibres.

Currencies have also changed.  At the Virginia fiber festival last month, I told someone they could get a basic wooden spindle manufactured in New Zealand for sale at the vendors' tents for x number of dollars.  A fellow handspinner and spindle enthusiast pointed out that the price had changed, it had risen a lot in the last while, and she said it was because of the difference in exchange rates.

I think currency changes have the potential to give a competitive edge to domestic production of handspinning tools.  I hope the manufacturers in New Zealand and Europe will be able to continue exports, as they have good products.

We are fortunate, in this age of cheap imports and offshore manufacturing done with the cheapest labour, that fibre arts tool producers still operate in developed countries.  When I went shopping for a bicycle the other week at a local bike shop here in Virginia, I couldn't find anything in my price range that was manufactured domestically.  The salesman told me that as recently as a couple of years ago, you could find a $1000 bicycle for sale that was manufactured domestically, but now they start at $3000.  I was hoping to find something under $200, so I asked if used bikes were available.  He told me that bike shops only recondition and resell high-end used bicycles that are worth the labour needed to meet safety requirements and avoid liability.  I would hate for this to ever happen to fibre arts equipment like looms or spinning wheels.

Antique Squirrel Cage Swift on Exhibit

Far away, off the beaten path past twisty mountain passes, in McDowell, Virginia, out in Highland county where the maple sap runs and the sheep population is supposed to be the highest in the state, there is a little country historical museum and in it is an old squirrel cage swift.

A squirrel cage swift, also called a rice, holds a skein of yarn while you pull from one end and wrap the yarn into a ball.  It is supposed to work better than the umbrella type, but the size, fixed (non-collapsable) shape, and cost is probably why you don't see them much.  It looks like two hamster cages set a yard apart on one upright pole.

The size of the swift in the museum is huge.  The skein spool parts are each almost as big as a bread box.  I didn't measure the swift so I can't be sure, but taking for scale David Bryant's measured drawings of a rice in Wheels and Looms: Making Equipment for Spinning and Weaving which gives the spokes of the spools as a mere 6 inches long, I would say the antique swift I saw was close to twice the size.  The height of the vertical piece was about as tall as me.

Back then, whenever back then was, the usefulness of the swift must have outweighed space considerations.

While the swift is constructed mostly of cut lumber and dowels, the base of the swift is made of little splayed feet under a large rough-hewn hunk of wood that retains some of the natural log shape.  I'm sure its mass lends a lot of stability.  Old great wheels have the same sort of construction in the base and legs, only the dimensions are necessarily longer and trimmer.

The grain of wood in the dowels reminds me of broom handles made at old-time festivals with vintage automatic machines.

The swift might be homemade.  It is on loan to the museum from a local family.  This is why I am not posting photos, because it is from a private collection.

The swift has lost the original peg used to adjust the height of the top spool to accommodate different sized skeins.  In the peg's place is a quill spindle that has lost its great wheel.  I think this is a great glimpse into what fiber tools people used to have around.

I Give You Strauch!

I give you the man who makes Strauch drum carders, Strauch ball winders, and Strauch hand cards: Otto Strauch himself!

Here he is at the fiber festival.  You can see a shelf full of Strauch Fiber Equipment wool cards behind him in full and child size.  He and his team make fiber tools in Virginia where this fiber festival is held, and he considers local production to be a selling point of his products.

He describes himself as frugal, and offers this frugal tip: remove the stretchy drive band off the Strauch ball winder when not in use to prolong its life.

You'll remember that last year I meant to post my photo of him from the fiber festival but didn't get his image release.  Fortunately this year I found he was quite pleased at the prospect of "being on another blog somewhere out there."  A customer was happy to be seen on the blog too.

Dimensioned Drawings of a Flax Break Tool

Found dimensioned drawings of a flax break tool, along with specifications for hackles, in SpinOff Winter 1983. Been looking for such a thing. Filing this under "good to know," and "someday maybe."