No loose ends

After all the things I’ve been through, one of the lessons I have learned is that one should not live with loose ends: don’t put important things off until tomorrow, or next week, or next year … don’t assume you’ll always have time to make it right later, that ‘someday’ you can do what you dream.

Someday may not come.

This isn’t meant to be a morbid thought, but an empowering one: after all, if we patch up our differences quickly instead of letting them fester and grow, then we are happier. Who wants to live with old, fermented anger, anyway? It’s no fun. Makes you miserable. Yes, it’s hard to be the one to put down your weapons first, to be the guy who takes the first step towards reconciliation, but it’s not impossible. And being at peace with the world around you is a much more pleasant way to live.

If you have a dream, if there’s something you long to do, why wait to pursue it? Yes, sometimes you have to choose which things you’ll do right now and which things you may do later … but if you can do this thing you long to do right now, then why wait?

What’s got me thinking about all of this now? This morning, in downtown Edmonton, a young woman died after being struck by a bus. She was on her way to work, just another routine morning … and she won’t be coming home again.

I knew her husband. We were close friends, years ago, but we’ve been separated by time and circumstance and I had not met his beautiful wife, though I could see that she made him very happy. Today, she is suddenly gone, and my heart aches for him. He now faces the long road of grief, a difficult road that offers no bypasses and no shortcuts. I have walked that road so many times, and I would spare him the journey if I could … but I can’t. All I can do is offer to walk any part of it with him, if he needs me to, and send him my love.

None of us are here forever. Every moment of life is precious. Honour the One who gave you the gift of your life by celebrating, loving, and living well every moment you are blessed with.

This healing thing takes a long time

If you read the post titled Listen from awhile back, you will have gathered that I am off work until the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder has eased and I can get back into regular life.

Yes, I am still off work. The current “projected date of recovery” is some time in September, but really, that’s just a guess. PTSD is one of those things that takes as long as it takes, especially when the triggering incidents unfolded over a long period of time, as mine did, and it’s very difficult to predict what the path of recovery will look like.

For me, apparently, this part of the path of recovery looks like the life of an adrenalin addict with an unlimited supply of juice. I run for days on high throttle, unable to rest or relax, but also unable to sustain any kind of focused concentration for long. I go from one project to another, knitting a bit on this, then a bit on that, spinning some, carding some, restoring a wheel, surfing the web, reading a book, figuring out a lace pattern, starting another project, pulling it back and starting something else with the same yarn … on and on I go. After a few days of this, I feel utterly exhausted, but, poisoned by my own adrenalin, I still can’t rest. Eventually, I crash and sleep for ten hours at a stretch for a day or two … and then it all starts again.

It is getting a little less wild: the adrenalin high isn’t quite as rough as it used to be, there’s way less chest pain and I suspect my blood pressure is leveling out … and the exhausted crashes don’t last as long.  I’m also able to do a bit more on any given day than I was at the start – early on, just getting out of the house to see the doctor was enough to knock me out for the rest of the day, despite the adrenalin overdose. This weekend, I survived a family trip to the waterpark without any chest pain or subjective anxiety. Today, though, the bill has come in -  my body feels like it’s been through some kind of wringer, the chest pain and throat tightness are back, and I’m rattled and unsettled. It’s better than it used to be, though. Eventually, my body will reset to a more even keel and riding out the highs and lows is how I can teach my body that all I really need on a day to day basis is a really, really low dose of the juice. Just enough to stay awake and concentrate would be fine, thanks.

Despite that knowledge, it’s easy to feel like nothing productive is happening. Mostly I feel like I ought to be better by now – I mean, come on, I’ve got stuff to do, places to go, people to see! I said that to my counselor during my last appointment and she laughed at me … then apologized for finding it so funny. “But you are doing a lot of stuff!” she said. “Look at what you have written, look at all the work you are doing processing this. An awful lot happened to you, and now you have to work through all of it and let it reform into a new shape in your mind. It takes time to sort it all out, to take down the old pathways and build new ones.”

So, yes, it takes however long it takes. If a friend of mine were living through what I’m living right now, I’d say “Of course you need the time! The story you are reliving now unfolded over the course of ten years, then you tried to get by without really looking at it for another six. Get things sorted out and reorganized so that it stops making you ill. Take the time now, or you’ll find yourself in ER in another year or two, probably with something worse than psychosomatic pain.”

So I write, and knit, and weave, and putter, and lie awake at night, and do yoga, and follow the whims of my overactive mind, knowing that the only way out is through.

I discovered after writing Listen (and more importantly, after hitting the Publish Now button to release the story to the wider world) that telling the story sets me free from the weight of my history. When the words are out there, then they are not stuck in here. They are no longer my burden to carry but are transformed into my contribution to the unknown and unnamed strangers out there who will find strength or inspiration or the small shred of hope it takes to carry them through their darkness into the inevitable light.

There are more words coming. Writing them is part of my journey – and though I don’t know how, or where, or when, I know that those same words will be part of someone else’s journey too. It’s my job to put them where they can be found.

If I’m not back in a month, send ink. :)

New bottle baby

We have a new lamb!

Natalie delivered twins, though one was stillborn. Poor Nat … she is old, and I suspect she has OPP (a progressive lung disease like chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in humans, which is transmitted through the milk to offspring, and interferes with lactation as well). There’s no way Natalie can feed a lamb (I really shouldn’t have let her get bred this year, but my fences aren’t up to keeping everyone separated) so … we have a lovely little bottle baby.

She is adorable. She’s quite tiny – I suspect they were a little early. Here she is, warming up on the heating pad, with the kitten trying to play with her:

She was born on April first, so we call her Folly.

Right now she spends most of her day in a big cardboard box in the living room, where we can hear her when she bellows for milk (she’s not at all shy about this), though on warm, sunny days she spends time outside in a big pen on the deck. Today when I went out to burn trash in the big burn barrel, she came and wandered around the yard while I did my chores.

She looks just like her mama, right down to the one brown patch on her leg. I’m glad she’s here, and she’ll stay here … Nat will have to go to the butcher (a quick death at his hands is far preferable to the slow painful death the OPP will bring her).

Bottle babies always remember that The People brought them food – Cherub, The Boy’s bottle lamb, is still the first to run up to you when you go outside. Here’s hoping that little Folly continues to grow well and grows up to be just as wonderful as her mama!

Soapstone Carving

Yeah, I know … not quite the subject line you expected to see here, is it?

One of the really cool things about the Virtual School that The Boy attends is that when they have parent-teacher interviews, they incorporate some kind of neat field trip or other experience at the same time. Fall interviews were held at Fort Edmonton and the kids got to make bannock and do pioneer activities, and all the family is welcome, even if not all the kids are in virtual school. The Reluctant Farmer took all 3 kids to the fall interviews, and the littlest ones definitely had a good time. The Boy has done a lot of that before, but he certainly ate his share of bannock. :)

Today we got to see a presentation on Inuit culture and attend a soapstone carving workshop. Did you know that the word Eskimo is Cree for “eats raw meat”? The Inuit are very different from the other First Nations people here in Canada, their climate and environment have, of course, shaped their culture in unique ways. They eat raw meat in order to get nutrients that might be removed by cooking, but also because there aren’t any trees to use for fuel, so what would you cook with? The presenter told of taking a hockey team south to a tournament, and the kids were picking up branches and leaves to take home to show their siblings, who had never seen a real tree. That’s hard to even imagine!

The carving workshop was really interesting. We were each given a small slab of soapstone (which has nothing to do with soap, actually, but it is soft and definitely shines when polished) and instructed to draw the outline of the shape we wanted to make. The Boy made a sheep and I made a Japanese Kokeshi. Big files were used to take off the largest chunks of stone, then gradually finer files and eventually sandpaper to smooth the surface. It’s amazing to see the pile of dust (which looks a lot like sawdust) that used to be rock forming in your work space!

Here are the finished objects:

Yarn Kabobs (a variegated yarn dyeing strategy)

I had a bunch of spun singles that I think I’d like to weave into something … probably a scarf or something similar. They were spun over the last several years, and making something out of my ‘history’ of spinning is appealing to me just now.

However, they were all plain white wool – and not all quite the same white, nor the same kind of wool, so clearly some added colour was called for. I got out the crock pot and thought about how to make something ‘interesting’ … and once again, my mind turned to the drill and metal knitting needles. I know, I’m odd.

I’d read about people putting a skein, ball or cake of yarn into the dye pot in order to get variegated yarn – the outside dyes darker colours, and it gradually gets lighter toward the inside, as the dye doesn’t seep through all the way. So … what if I wound my singles onto knitting needles, like I do when I’m weaving, and then put the whole thing in the crock pot?

Well, turns out it works. First, you make yarn kabobs by winding the singles onto metal knitting needles. Then you stick those in the crock pot, flipping end for end every so often to keep as much as possible submerged:

(Yes, that’s a dye lid – there wasn’t much left of the red, so I just plunked the whole thing in, lid, jar and all.

After it’s done cooking, you set the kabobs out to dry partway:

Then you skein the yarn (at which point you discover that squishing the wet yarn on the needles is a bad idea, and tying the tail end somewhere you can find it later would be a really good idea):

If you want long colour runs, fill the whole needle end to end as you wind on – like a sewing machine bobbin fills up, top to bottom then back again. If you want shorter colour runs, fill it more like a spinning wheel bobbin: one section then the next then the next.

Now I just have to figure out what to use for warp so that I can get a balanced, open weave. Something nice and fine … crochet cotton, perhaps. That’s the next adventure!

Weaving as therapy

Weaving is good therapy. It goes quickly, so you feel productive, and it’s actually fairly physical – there’s a lot of movement involved, passing the shuttle back and forth through the warp threads, and there’s the very emphatic bash of the beater bar on the finished fabric. It’s probably a sign of the bad shape I’m in that I warm up quite a bit while working at the loom, and if I do a long stretch of weaving, I can feel it in my arms later on.
Still, I’m in need of all the therapy I can get these days, so I warped up the loom to try a simple blanket project.
I used a new technique for warping the loom, after getting some ideas from rigid heddle weavers. I ran cotton warp from a spinning wheel to the loom, up through the reed, the heddle, and over the top metal bar lashed to the warp beam … then back down in reverse and to the spinning wheel, where I cut off the thread and tied it to a bamboo pole laid on the floor and wedged in place. I continued until I ran out of warp, and ended with about 24” on the loom. I held tension on the threads while The Boy helped wind onto the beam, and voila - warp in place. Much easier than anything I’ve done before.

The weft started life a hideous salmon pink, but it was nice and soft (for acrylic) and the price was right – I got the whole bag for about $6 at the thrift store. It overdyed nicely with Rit in the crock pot, and turned into shades vaguely reminiscent of cherry cola. The variations in colour show nicely in the finished weaving, though it’s in a few blocks as I didn’t bother interspersing from the various skeins that took up dye differently.
When weaving on the tapestry loom, the shed is upright, so you can't really toss a boat shuttle through the way you can when it's horizontal. I use big metal knitting needles for shuttles: I put the tip in the chuck of the drill, wrap the skein around the handles of the foozeball table so it can unwind freely off one end, and then load up the knitting needle with the drill. It goes pretty fast, and although my makeshift yarn swift sometimes hiccups and needs a helping hand to get the skein to unwind cleanly, the price is certainly right. The long knitting needles mean that I can pass the shuttle through without having to put too much stress on the end warp threads, even on a fairly wide warp such as this one.

The finished fabric is a close-to-balanced weave, fairly light, and open as I used 8 epi and the weft yarn is pretty light. I used a variation of hemstitching for the first time too, and liked how that worked - I’ll try to get better at it. :)

My step daughter will be getting this for her birthday in May. She loves everything pink, and the varying shades of pink purple and red in this will make her happy. She doesn’t surf the web yet, so I can tell you now. ;)

The Great Wheel

I have read about Great Wheels, and seen one in pieces (though never one all together or in working condition). They’re neat wheels … they are older than the flyer wheels that we normally think of when we thing “spinning wheel”. Essentially, a great wheel takes a drop spindle and puts it on it’s side, using a great big wheel (which the user turns by hand) to put the spin on the spindle. The spinner walks while spinning – pacing backwards while drawing out the yarn from the spindle with one hand and turning the wheel with the other, then pacing forwards to wind on the finished single. They are meditative to use, as you learn the dance of fibre and wheel.

Now, lovely as they are, they are huge. They need room to walk in order to use them. I have a house full of wheels. No need to add a great wheel to  the mix.

You see where this is going, don’t you?

So … I’m checking out the ads on Kijiji, like I always do, looking for wheels that are looking for homes. Right there, at the top of the list, posted not an hour earlier, was a great wheel – free. I thought about it for oh, five seconds, and sent an email. I explained that I am a spinner who loves to restore old wheels, and that I would very much like to give this wheel a home where it can come back to productive life. Then I paced anxiously, hoping for a response. It did occur to me how silly it was to go from thinking “nah, I don’t need a great wheel” to feeling like this one just NEEDED to come home with me!

Within a couple of hours, the lady got back to me. She liked the sound of my email, and thought the wheel did indeed belong at my house. How marvellous! We emailed back and forth a bit, and I learned that the wheel had belonged to her mother, Shirley, who did not spin but loved antiques. Apparently she spent quite a bit of time finding “just the right wheel”, and it was of her treasured possessions (not stored in a barn, like so many other great wheels!). Seven years ago this Friday, Shirley died suddenly of a heart attack while on vacation, and since then, this beautiful wheel has lived in her daughter’s basement. With basement renovations coming to make room for a growing family, the wheel had to go … so she posted it, and I responded. When I picked up the wheel today, i found adorable children and a happy household. I’m honoured to be chosen to carry the story of Shirley’s wheel forward into the future.

There’s a wee bit of work to do on the wheel, but not much. It does need a proper spindle – apparently there’s one somewhere in the basement and it may turn up as renovation preparations continue. I have a temporary one in place for now (made of a knitting needle, a wine cork and a rubber band) – enough to spin a sample of yarn and see that the wheel holds a drive band and will happily spin!

Someone described great wheels as the ‘matriarchs of wheels’. After seeing Shirley’s lovely grandchildren today, I think this wheel should be named “Grandma Shirley”  … in honour of her previous owner, and her status as matriarch of wheels.

I like to think that the real Grandma Shirley would be pleased. Her daughter seemed to think she would be.