the Village Knittiot

Just in case my obsession with enjoyment of knitting, spinning and all things fiber wasn’t enough I thought it might be time to add something new to the mix. As I mentioned a couple posts ago, I’ve been completely absorbed with reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan. For me, our relationship with food, its role in good health, the environmental impact of our growing systems and agricultural theory have long been an interest of mine. The evolution of my awareness and the resulting changes I have made at each stage of the game are not something I typically talk about here, but I am feeling more and more of a need to write about it these days. Pollan’s book coupled with May’s Eat Local Challenge (not to mention the Summer of Knitting Naturally and other attempts to green-up our Village) have really gotten me thinking about my food and where it comes from — no longer just about whether or not it is organic and/or healthy and/or affordable.

Because I have (once again) found myself too late to join any of the local CSAs that I am interested in, my thoughts naturally turned to the backyard. Despite living in a bustling metropolitan area, we are lucky enough to have a little postage stamp sized piece of earth behind our apartment. And I must confess that, until this week, it was almost feeling a little too big and the prospect of taming its wildness a little overwhelming. For those of you who grew up in houses with yards and possibly gardens, this may seem silly, but as someone who spent her entire childhood and most of adulthood in an apartment — usually on an upper floor — lawn care and/or gardening was not something I had to think about. When we bought and briefly owned a house, I had delusions of becoming a great gardener and growing bountiful vegetables and amazing flowers. That lasted for about one afternoon, after which I retreated into the house and told my backyard it could do whatever it wanted. Occassionally I would head out there and try to show it who was boss, but this (wo)man had no dominion over her land. I gave up and let my backyard become very unkempt natural.

When I was younger I spent a considerable amount of time at my aunt’s house. She lived in the country and kept what to my 5-year-old self felt like an enormous garden. She would slather sunscreen on us some afternoons and send us out into the rows to weed. We hated it and complained bitterly. We also got very little done and usually spent the day sitting in the midst of the green beans picking and eating them right off the plants. They were delicious, but the experience did not improve my green thumb. There were also a couple of years that we had an apartment on the ground floor where we planted a lovely little flower garden around the edges of our stone patio and that was singularly satisfying. So, I’ve never planted vegetables and I have no reason to believe that I am going to be any good at it. But you know what? I do believe it. I believe it with a rabid intensity. Thus, I have set about planning and creating a summer vegetable garden…

While undertaking a task of this nature is normally quite overwhelming for this little knittiot, for some reason I have been really good at breaking down each task into manageable, bite-sized steps. So, I spent a leisurely Wednesday evening at the bookstore flipping through some of their gardening books. I’ve decided that even though we have a backyard that has some actual dirt, this isn’t a permanent place of residence and therefore container gardening is the best way to go. Portable gardens can be carried with you. Next I tamed the wilds of the area, trimming back the enormous bush that had taken over most of the growing space and pulling up the mammoth weeds that had managed to pop up all over. Today a trip to the local hardware store will result in some chicken wire for creating a small yard waste compost pile. I have also drawn several diagrams of what the space will look like. Some are ridiculously ambitious and involve plans to can tomatoes in the fall. Others are more manageable. I’m leaning toward manageable, mostly because I prefer to succeed in my pursuits.

Pictures will follow at various points along the way…

Fleece Update
And lest you worry about my poor fleeces and fear they have been abandoned to a new monomania, I assure you I love all my children equally. The washed bits from the cold water scouring experiment have now been either combed or carded. My first attempt to spin the fleece involved using some of the carded rolags. The results were awful. It was difficult to spin and the resulting yarn was very rough and not at all what I want to be knitting with. Nevertheless, I plied it and knit a rather rustic looking gauge swatch. While it isn’t the softest thing in the world, I must say that the colors are just gorgeous — a lovely, subtly varigated, brown/grey tweed. I am certain that the issues with the rolags have far more to do with my inability to card correctly, so I am looking more into what I am doing wrong.

After the unsatisfying results from spinning with the rolags, I decided to try spinning straight from the lock after combing out the tips and the shorn end a little. The result was scrumptious. Easy to spin. Soft and inviting singles. Even the plying was a joy. All around a very good attempt and I now have my first sizable ball of handspun somewhere in a 2-ply lace-weight range. Sample swatch to follow at a later date.

I did manage to wash some more of the fleece, this time in the recommended hot water and the results were much, much better. However, despite two washes and two rinses, the tips are still quite matted and dirty. In the book Hands on Spinning by Lee Raven, she actually advocates a method of fleece washing that has you slightly agitate the tips to get the dirt out. I am planning on trying out her instructions on the next round which will probably be sometime this weekend. Once I determine which method I most prefer, I will be finishing up this fleece in short order and moving onto the other two, which I am hoping to process much more quickly than I have this one and probably in larger batches.

On a final note, things around the Village may be a little quiet over the next week or so. My best friend and her husband are coming out to visit us over memorial day weekend and there is much work to be done before they arrive. So updates may be few. Hope you all have a wonderful weekend!

This entry was posted on Friday, May 19th, 2006 at 6:23 am and is filed under Fleece Adventures, Summer of Knitting Naturally, this Random Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.