High-fiber Lifestyle

Between sharing living space with various pet critters and stashes of yarn/roving/fleece, we kind of joke about our diets and lifestyle being high in fiber - even if the fiber turning up in our dinner plates isn't quite the kind usually recommended by doctors.

If it's any dietary help, though, I expect that I must be getting at least the minimum daily servings, especially this week. 

Thursday afternoon I was over to Deb's. Her neighbor has the local Girl Guide troop, and she had booked us in to teach them how to spin. So after supper we toddled across the street with bags of fleece, to be greeted by almost 2 dozen girls on the lawn, and a similar number of basic spindles. We each took half, and dove in. That's probably the best description of it. They were a great bunch of girls, really, but trying to pay attention to 10 or 12 of them at a time and troubleshoot the spinning was a tad overwhelming at times. I expect the leaders must get the same feeling - one confided (only half jokingly) when we were talking later, that Thursday evenings after meeting were her drinking night. We survived, though, and all the girls managed to spin and rough-ply a few meters of yarn. They then abandoned us to learn to finger-knit from a couple girls who knew how, and to get a quick talk and demo of a sock-knitting machine, from someone I met at the Farm Show not long ago, where she had the sock machine also.

Home and unpack and repack, and back to Deb's Friday morning for Fleece Spa, and putting together the display for Monday's talk with our samples of the rare breeds fibers.

Today I didn't have to go anywhere, so I've been slaving over the stove all day. Not food, but mordanting wool for dyeing. Part of the blanks I ordered arrived Thursday, and so this morning my dining area looked like this, as I divided and weighed.

I can't wait to get started on the fun part, but I have to wait until the rest of the blanks arrive, hopefully early next week, and get mordanted in their turn.  Then I will have to re-sort wool and plan the dyebaths to maximize efficiency. In the meantime, tomorrow I will go out knitting, and hopefully get close to finishing my shawl-in-progress. 

I did wonder today, coming in with the cat, what the neighbors must think is going on in here. The back entry smelled like wet wool, with a bit of a tang from the alum/cream of tartar mordant, and the front entry smelled of mold or damp dirt, from the madder and bedstraw roots I have drying there. Well, no matter about them. I'm off to remove the last chunks of roving from the pot, and make a nice cuppa.