the leaving

Wednesday. Midday. Place St Clement, Luz. Waiting for my ride to arrive. Waiting with N. 

Just before the leaving the ache of love can be so strong and powerful. Our breakfast this morning made me miss him, even before I had left. 

And now the car is pulling up. They are putting my rucksack into the boot and I cling to him for one last embrace.

"Meet me in Brittany!" he shouts as the car pulls away.   

Kilometres are flying by my window as the first leg of my journey begins from Luz to Santander. West towards the Atlantic at Biarittiz, then crawling along the verdant Basque coast, entre mer et montagne, south across the border and down across northern Spain. Then on an overnight ferry to Plymouth tonight and a much needed few weeks of rest with my family in Dorset. Later Brittany. 

Already anticipating the first cup of Earl-Grey tea on arrival at my folk's place in two days time...

point d'ancrage

 
Je suis née de l'autre côté de la Manche, en Grande Bretagne. 

Ma région, c'est le Dorset.  

Là-bas, on ne connaît pas l'extrême. 

Les paysages de mon enfance sont en nuances, en courbes, en rondeurs. 

 
Les collines se succèdent à la mer. 

Le climat tempéré ne varie point d'une année à l'autre.

Plus jeune, c'était depuis là-bas que je rêvais d'ailleurs... 
 

 
  ...mais le Dorset, ça sera toujours mon point d'ancrage.

Voilà plus de six mois que je n'ai pas mis le pied en Angleterre. J'adore ma vie montagnarde mais de temps en temps, le désir de rentrer vers l'origine, vers les sources est très fort. 

Sans me retourner, je fonce, prend une grande respiration, de l'élan, et saute par dessus de la Manche qui marque la frontière entre ce pays où tout m’est étranger et ce pays que j’ai toujours connu...

Dans trois jours, j'y serai...

under tension

 
The early morning scent of brewing coffee. The first rays of golden light out on the balcony. The fleece in my hand is bouncy, soft. Like a tiny fluffy cloud. It feels exactly like it belongs there. My head starts spinning with a hundred million billion willion thoughts. Now is the time to bring them out. Let them breath. With each turn of the treadle, they tumble out. Thoughts only. Dreams. Little sadnesses. As I draft the wool, the wheel twists the fibres together. My thoughts twist into the thread, wind onto the bobbin and are held in place by the tension between my hand and the wheel. It is time to let go, to put tension and stress to better use. It is time to make yarn.  

spud spindle

Spinning my own wool was on my mind over the winter. With the first golden rays of Spring sunshine, I acquired an ancient spinning wheel and set about making yarn.

The only inconvenience of the wheel, is that it can't be easily moved about. And I like nothing more than to do my handicrafts in the fresh air, where possible. So a week before coming to England, on a whim (and if truth be told, as a bit of a joke) I improvised a drop spindle from an old chopstick...and a potato!

 

All that week-end, I spun for a few minutes here and there throughout the day, getting my fingers, hands and arms used to the different posture and method of working.

I spun at home in short bursts, stood on the balcony after lunch listening to the radio. I slipped the spindle into my rucksack when we went for a short walk across the fields and up to the castle.

Over the week-end, I even took my spud and bundle of carded fibres down to a local barn dance, spinning in the corner by the traditional Gascon band.

Having at first struggled to coordinate feet, fingers and head when I first started spinning with the wheel, I'd imagined spindling to be even harder. Yet experiments with my potato made me realise just how much knowledge I've already gleaned from playing with the wheel.

2 ply woollen (spud) spindle-spun yarn, (23g)

My first attempts on the wheel had been highly frustrating and resulted in a lot of initial wastage. But over the course of the week-end, I managed to produce a satisfactory set of two singles which were surprisingly fine and even. I plied them together in short bursts the following week and was once again surprised at just how easy the process turned out to be. So far, plying my singles has been proving my real bête noire. But I seemed to learn a great deal with my little spud spindle.

wild larder

  1) Nettles. 2) Lungwort. 3) Cowslips. 4) Navelwort.  

We haven't had a veggie garden since last spring, when a terrible flood washed it down to the sea. But Mother Nature has been kind to us so far this year, ensuring our larder stays stocked full of fresh greens and vitamins, providing you know where to look  of course.

Nettle soup and pesto. Watercress and navelwort salad. Wild garlic tarte. Beside the river, the green shooting things keep on sprouting. In the kitchen, the possibilities are endless. 

socks for baby A

Over the weekend, a new little boy arrived in the world! One of my favourite gifts to welcome in a newborn is a pair of tiny socks.

These are a fun and and quick knit, perfect for an afternoon knitting in the woods. I couldn't resist making the newborn size - they really are teeny tiny. They'll have to be used as much as possible now, whilst they still fit, and then passed onto to another small person.

Pattern: Paton's stretch baby socks
Yarn: recycled
Needles: 2,5 mm

*Good job I made up a few pairs in different sizes.... 

wild garlic

 
We noticed it at the start of April. Whilst walking beside the river, it was as if someone had taken a green pencil crayon and scribbled furiously amongst the trees.

One minute it was brown and dull, winter's leftover. The next it was verdant and bright. Spring is slowly creeping in.

Nothing else seemed to have changed. The hills are still muddy brown. The sky continues to yo-yo between blue and shades of grey. But the green, a sea of wild garlic [ail des ours] has been stealthily creeping in for weeks, sometimes beneath snow, to suddenly reveal itself.

We're still waiting for the nettles. But down by the river, there is wild garlic in abundance.  

For my birthday, after the cake, we made a salad from navelwort and chives and a wild-garlic quiche from plants we had gathered in the woods down by the river the day before.

scouring

Once I had sorted the fleeces as best I could, it was time to get on with the really mucky job: scouring. Scouring means removing the dirt and grease present in the raw fleeces through thorough washing. This leaves the fleeces in a clean(ish), grease free state reading for spinning and dying. I'll wash them again once I've spun and plyed some yarn into skeins. 

Washing the fleece before spinning is not entirely necessary. Apparently, it is possibly easier and more enjoyable to spin yarn "in the grease". Working with the fleece in the first few weeks after a sheep has been shorn means it is easier to slide and draft the fibres onto the wheel because the natural lanolin produced by the sheep. The lanolin can also be soothing on the hands.

I was initially quite keen to give this method a go, but the fleeces I brought home are already a couple of months old. The brown fleece seemed even older as the suint seemed to have dried and had started to make the locks a little tough. I also felt compelled to wash the fleeces in a spirit of neighbourliness. We had been storing the fleeces on the balcony and the sheep smell (which doesn't actually bother us) seemed to become particularly pungent on both damp and hot days. We didn't want our neighbour to complain we had a farmyard on our balcony, so we decided to wash them.  

After much research and even more deliberation, we decided to try a slightly controversial method of scouring - in the washing machine. We soaked the worst of the soiled fleece overnight in a bowl and then the next day bundled it up into a big net sack I had made for the occasion and into the washing machine. We washed it on a wool wash, (40° to dissolve the grease) with minimal spinning and plenty of washing-up liquid. I was quite nervous that at the best I'd end up with a felted fleece and at the worst, I'd ruin our washing machine.

 

But my fears weren't necessary and the fleeces came out clean(er), if a little tangled up.

It took a further good five days of very warm weather and drying out on the balcony for the fleeces to dry properly and for all trace of sheepy scent to dissipate. But I'm very pleased with the results of our first endeavours and can't wait to get onto the next stage of the fibre preparation: carding.

sorting

So we had located, selected and dragged home a pile of filthy fleeces. Before my eager hands could get them anywhere near my spinning wheel, they first had to be sorted and then scoured.  

I began by sorting. 

We laid the fleeces out one by one on the balcony, tips side up. The wool of a complete fleece has areas of different grades of fibre. The aim generally is to sort the fleece, dividing the best wool from the neck, shoulders and quarter of the way down the back, discarding the rest and removing the most soiled areas. Because of the differences in crimp length and fineness, if different parts of a fleece are muddled up whilst spinning, it may spoil the appearance of the finished yarn or cause it to make an uneven texture.  

Some spinners will go even further and separate the different qualities of wool into different cleaning and spinning batches to ensure an even spin. The unevenness of a spun yarn can go even further and lead to an uneven tension whilst knitting, resulting in a saggy sweater. 

 

I've been studying my spinning books for over a month in preparation for this task and fully intended to adhere to the advice.  Although it looked as though they had been shorn to a high standard, once shorn, the fleeces had been rather man-handled and roughly chucked together for storage. This made the identification process somewhat difficult and unfortunately once presented with a shorn fleece, I literally could make neither head nor tail of the thing!

I spent a long time picking through the fleeces, removing as much vegetation as possible as well as the shorter bits which I assume were from the legs and belly, although I can't be sure. Hopefully I'll be present at the next shearing in the autumn so that I can sort and process the fleeces as they are shorn. 

For the time being, I did the best I could and ended by deciding to get going with the washing and then card and spin with whatever parts come to hand. I am learning after all. 

getting fleeced

On such a filthily cold and drizzly day back in March, my happiness came from up above, or in fact going up above to Gèdre and riffling through a barn filled with recently shorn fleeces. There were seemingly hundreds and hundreds of fleeces to pick from, in various states of filthiness (straw, manure and grease and other such farm-yardy things). I ended up picking out four, three white grey fleeces and one mottled brown. 

All my spinning books warn against accepting a "free fleece", a sure way to get fleeced apparently. But even to my un-trained novice's eye, the locks appeared to have a well-defined crimp and the shearing was done by a professional so there was minimal second cuts. 

I don't know who was more delighted, me or our farmer friend Matthieu who told me to come and help myself to more whenever I want.