Old & lovely

It’s a distaff, for spinning wool. (Or flax, but I’d've thought it would have a comb on top if it was for bast fibres.) You’re looking at the public side of it; the spinner sits on the flat part, and spins from the other side. It’s likely Russian, though I’m not going to rule out any of the Baltic countries; they have a great many textile traditions in common. I couldn’t even guess at its age; it does show a fair amount of use wear and there’s a few bits broken off.

For more than a year, the distaff has been waiting quietly in a corner of my living room, just perched on a shelf being beautiful. And then a thread came up on the Spindle Lore board on Ravelry, asking if anyone used a distaff… and I felt ashamed that I had this marvellous thing right here, and had never even tried it out.

So I did.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFSdZdHCh40

I’m not very good at it yet, but I can already see how incredibly useful this tool is – I can spin fine yarns faster and more productively. I have no idea why distaffs never migrated to North America, and why they’ve never found a place in modern spindle spinning. My mind is blown by this wonderful, useful, gorgeous thing.

PS: There’s no sound in that video, but the only thing you’d hear is the dog snoring anyway. And me swearing softly.

PPS: See that basket sitting on the cheese box beside my chair? There’s an Athabasca sleeve in there. But more on that in another post.

I have a soft spot for Twist; I like their philosophy. It’s less like a magazine and more like a showcase – designers retain the rights for their patterns after they’re published on Twist, and are free to sell them on their own websites or do whatever they want with them. Magazines and books, of course, keep the pattern rights themselves – designers get huge exposure, but lose the opportunity to profit directly further down the road by taking back an out-of-print pattern and re-publishing it themselves. I like knitting magazines – there’s a shamefully high stack of them in my workroom – but it’s always made me a little uncomfortable that the designers have to give up the rights to their pattern in perpetuity in order to get it published; it seems like an unfair deal for the designer, and it certainly doesn’t pay well. Twist Collective’s business model aims to change that, and gives designers a chance to put more money in their own pockets. This can only lead to more good things being designed.

I’d like to say I vote with my wallet and buy Twist patterns for philosophical reasons, in order to encourage business models that support designers. But I’d be lying – I buy the patterns because they’re beautiful, and well-written, and wearable by normal human beings. I’ve been wanting to make another pullover, and I don’t need another cabled one – cable sweaters are my default, when I can’t think of anything else to make. Still, I was on the verge of casting one on anyway – luckily, Fiona Ellis came along just in time to save me with Athabasca:

I’m loving the buttony goodness of this sweater. Have I ever told you how much I love buttons? oh yes, I do. I have jars and jars of buttons – biscuit tins of buttons, chocolate boxes of buttons. I buy them at yard sales and flea markets, in box lots at auctions. I’m mad for buttons. Here’s my chance to sew some onto something!

Of course I won’t be using the yarn that’s called for. I’ve no idea what I’m going to use. Maybe… maybe I’ll spin some…? In soft natural greys and browns maybe?

Time to toss the stash and see what falls out!

Warm & toasty toes

I like fancy hand-dyed luxury sock yarns just as much as the next knitter… but when it comes functional boot socks for a Canadian winter, nothing that can beat the sheer comfort and indestructibility of good old Paton’s Kroy. Stuff wears like iron.

When it first came out, I pooh-pooh’d it and said I couldn’t be bothered to get on another time-sucking social network. Then I started messing around with it, and discovered some really fascinating knitters on there that I’d never have found any other way. I also said I’d poke out my eyes with a dpn before I ever knit a dishcloth, but I then tried one and realized I was being silly – knitted dishcloths are the best thing ever.

However, I am standing my ground on that ridiculous hexipuff thing.

So you can imagine my jaw-dropping surprise and delight when I got an email telling me I’d bought the wheel… for even less than my low-ball bid. Obviously there were no spinners in the room on auction day – oh, lucky lucky me! (Insert happy dance here.) A couple days later, the auctioneer was even kind enough to deliver it to my door. (Click photos to embiggen, if you like.)

My stunning Bisson wheel

This wheel was made by one of the Bisson family – probably Louis, probably sometime in the mid-1880′s. It’s not marked, but the style and construction identify it with certainty: Bissons have a form that’s remarkably unique among French-Canadian production wheels. You can pick them out at a distance by counting the number of spokes (8 – fewer than most wheels of that period), and observing the sexy, rakish slant of the table (steeper than most others). When you look closer, you can see the outstanding beauty and skillfulness of the the lathe-turned spokes, wheel posts and support posts:

Graceful turnings

The flyer has a signature form, with strong shoulders and a sturdy one-piece construction… again, it’s a shape you only see on Bisson wheels. The delicate little finials on the tips of the maidens often get broken off over the years, so I was thrilled to see that they’re still intact on this one:

Mother-of-all

It’s a screw-tension wheel, so it isn’t a Canadian Production Wheel in the accepted use of the special, all-capital-letters term – CPWs are exclusively tilt-tension, and their tension mechanisms always involve iron in some sort of way. This wheel comes from an earlier era, and was probably one of the kinds of traditional Quebec wheel that influenced the more radical CPW design.

In this wheel, you see the art of the 19th-century Quebec wheelwrights at its highest form – graceful, strong, eminently practical, and designed from the ground up for speed and high production. I can’t wait to take it apart and give it a good cleaning – that dreadful black gunk on there is the build-up you get from a century of lubricating with oil and animal grease, and it’ll take some scrubbing to get it off. So I’ve had to set it aside until after I get back from SOAR… which I just realized is less than a week away now, and I suppose it’s time for me to start flailing around and panicking a bit because I’m so totally not ready.

Springville is fantastic if you’re looking for a farmer’s market; there were rows of tables overflowing with harvest bounty: ripe fruit, bushels of veg, local cheeses, apple cider, homemade bread and pies. As you wander the outdoor booths, keep a wary eye out for farm trucks trying to back up to the building to unload chickens, goats and calves for the afternoon livestock auction – the market has grown faster than the space available for it, and it’s crowded and busy.

The flea market sprawls up the hill behind the auction building. It’s not the best one I’ve been to for antique hunting; booths of bulk-purchase t-shirts, tube-socks and sunglasses, birdhouses, yard-sale cast-offs and tables groaning under the weight of cheap Chinese tools. There are treasures to be found, but you have to dig for them.

A few handsome flea-market finds

Nowadays, I don’t collect just for the sake of collecting; I buy things that I’m going to use. The laundry mangle is fully functional and in good condition – a bit of cleaning and oiling and it’ll be ready to go back to work; the lovely graphics on it are a bonus. I’ll use it to squeeze the excess water out yarn skeins when I’m dyeing. The sock blockers were an irresistible deal: $1. The dangerously pointy thing that’s sitting on them is a rug-hooking tool – yet another textile craft that I’ve been collecting books on and planning to try.

The best find of the day was buried in a stack of random textiles on a tidy table at the very back of the showfield – a lovely rectangular shawl, knitted closely from fine wool on small needles. It’s in quite poor condition, moth-eaten and yellowed with age. Though it’s generally difficult to put a date on textiles, I’d guess that this is pretty old – the pattern is garter-stitch based, typical of Victorian knitting. Subtle variations in the yarn and the colour of the wool make me suspect that it’s handspun, but I can’t be sure; if it is, the spinner was very skilled.

Lacey ends, a plain garter-stitch center

Close-up of pattern

The knitting is perhaps less skilled; there’s an obvious mistake down one side of the border in the middle section, where a vertical row of zig-sag eyelets is missing. If you examine the end section very closely, you can see where the pattern fails and somehow ends up with the borders out of sync – when the knitter got to the middle garter section, I can imagine her coming to a horrible realization of the error, and that her two choices were to carry on with no eyelet row, or rip hundreds of rows in the patterned end and start over.

She went the same way I would have: no way, we won’t be ripping all that out. It’s not an error – it’s a modification.

I felt an immediate sympathetic bond to that long-ago knitter; I’ve seen written patterns from the Victorian era, and they’re often hopelessly vague and riddled with errata. I can almost feel her frustration echoing down the years, and I admire her for carrying on and completing her shawl anyway. That mistake is what makes the thing most beautiful to me.

So, like shoppers will do, I went online and tried to search for information on coffeemakers. It’s out there all right – a veritable deluge of information and reviews and opinions… after a couple hours of research, I felt like I was drowning in coffeepot data. I wasn’t even sure what I wanted anymore – I’d started looking for an inexpensive drip coffeemaker with a timer on it, but by the time I came up for air I’d almost convinced myself that I couldn’t live without a $300 stainless steel scientific brewing system from the Netherlands, complete with space-age carafe and an 80-page technical manual. This wasn’t getting me anywhere, and I knew why:

It’s called analysis paralysis, and it’s what happens when you’re faced with too many choices. There’s no real way to filter the flood of information and make an obvious and simple decision, so you get stuck. And worse, when you finally do make a choice, you’re left to wonder if the one you picked was the right one – could you have gotten something better for the same money? Did you spend your dollars responsibly?

I think as women we feel this most keenly – we’re supposed to be canny shoppers, and advertisers are quite aware that we control almost every household purchase, so they make us feel that it’s our job to buy the best we can at the cheapest prices, and if we don’t exercise the utmost caution and care, we are failures as consumers. Failures. So we agonize, and prioritize, and research, and worry, and feel empty and dissatisfied because we’re never sure we’ve done it right, and there’s always somebody out there that got a better deal.

I see this very often with new spinners buying their first wheel – there’s a very real anxiety and confusion there, compounded by the sheer amount of money they’re laying out for something that’s a hobby purchase… a luxury, a toy. I try to reassure them, to tell them that basically every modern middle-of-the-road wheel is a pretty good wheel for whatever kind of yarn you want to spin, and that the choice they make now should really be influenced most by what they can afford, rather than what they think they’re going to use the wheel for… because as you grow and change as a spinner, your needs will change, and by then you’ll know more about what kind of wheel you really want. A good tool will always hold its value, and a good spinning wheel can always be sold later for a hefty portion of what you paid for it – so it pays to buy the best you can easily budget for… but other than that, the brand or style doesn’t matter all that much. Just pick one, and go for it.

And that’s how I finally cut through my coffeemaker conundrum – I realized that all of the middle-of-the-road brands were going to make a decent cup o’ joe, which is really the only thing I’m looking for first thing in the morning. I went to Canadian Tire and bought the one that was on sale this week.

It makes a damn good pot of coffee.

Prizes at the Whac-a-Mole booth. For some reason, Rastafarian bananas were big this year.

There is a midway packed with games of chance and “skill”, designed to part you from your money in the most exciting way possible – Whac-A-Mole, Crown & Anchor, Shoot Out The Star, Skee-Ball. The rides are of the travelling variety, and therefore limited in the scope of thrills they can provide for adults… but for the kids, they’re the best thing ever.

The Everest of burgers: you eat it because it's there.

The Food Building is a slice of heaven for the junk food connoisseur. There were booths for a dozen nationalities: Greek, Thai, Italian, British, Chinese. Pizza, pirogies, Montreal smoked meat, poutine of every variety, chicken ‘n’ waffles, beaver tails. You could probably eat something healthy if you really tried… but who’s there to do that? Not me. Despite it’s non-Canadian-ness, I ate a Donut Burger for lunch: a beef patty smothered in cheese and bacon, and sandwiched between two Krispy Kreme donuts instead of a bun. I’m sorry to tell you that it was delicious – sweet, salty, tender, fatty and rich. It was topped with lettuce and tomato, as if that faint nod to the vegetable kingdom could stand against 1500 sugar-laden calories. It was, truly, an Epic Burger… but I’ll never eat one again.

The Marketplace and the International Pavilion are the CNE’s bazaar, with vendors offering merchandise from all over the world. Some of it was tacky and odd, but this has its own sort of charm. You could buy Iranian rugs, Israeli jewelery, Chinese vases, Russian dolls, Peruvian textiles, Ugandan carvings; Sham-Wows, magnetic bracelets, rubber-bristled floor mops, cake pans, silk scarves, dog collars, sheepskin slippers. I found a tiny Nepalese booth selling hand-knitted mittens for $10 – of course I snatched up a pair. The vendor claimed that they’re made from a blend of sheep’s wool and yak fibre… I’m not sure I’d swear that there’s actually any yak in there, but the single-ply wool is good and sturdy and surprisingly soft. They’re lined with polar fleece, and the jolly stripe-and-wave pattern is cheerful without being obnoxiously bright. I love the many-coloured fingers.

Beautiful mittens: chunky, bold and warm.

I can see that these mittens were made by a skilled production knitter, and designed to make money – the yarn is fat and fluffy so you need to knit fewer stitches, and the cuffs are as short as they can be. But they’re well-made, with even stitching and no mistakes that I can see, and the wave pattern is cleverly laid out so that it’s not distorted by the thumb increases. Click on the picture to make it bigger, and look at that thumb gusset: see how it starts near the middle of the palm? That’s unusual – most Western mittens with a thumb gusset start increasing at the edge of the palm. I don’t know if this a traditional Nepalese mitten method, or if the knitter chose it because of the wave pattern, or perhaps it uses just a little less yarn… and when you are knitting for pennies, every yard counts.

I’ll wear them this winter; they’ll keep my paws toasty warm, and when I put them on I’ll think of the knitter that made them… somewhere in Nepal.

Last night, I was feeling poorly after a long weekend at my regular job; sometimes the nightshifts really beat me up. After an afternoon of wandering aimlessly around the house – stiff, tired, stupid and sore -  I finally surrendered to my crabbiness, put on a pot of coffee and curled up on the sofa with a science fiction novel. I posted a note on Ravelry to let the others at Knit Night know that I didn’t have the oomph to come out. I was weak. Weak, I tell you.

Being too lazy to get up and let the dog out whenever she came whining, I propped open the screen door so she could come and go as she pleased in the fenced back yard.

Darkness fell. The dog let herself out.

She came dashing back in, threw herself into her bed and began rolling about, pitching all her toys to the floor and rubbing her face on the blankets. I looked up from my book and smiled to myself, charmed by her antics – why, the old girl was still playful after all these years.

The stripey nemisis

And then it hit me.

THE SMELL.

She’d tried to outrun it, but it’s impossible to outrun the stink that you are the source of. It billowed off her in green-tinged waves of semi-solid reek. I reeled and gagged, leapt off the couch and ran away. The dog chased after me, and I turned back in the hallway, yelling: “No! back on your bed! wait no not the bedroom carpet - !”

She tried to get rid of the vileness by rubbing her face on my legs – oh, splendid, now I was a stench carrier too.

I am not a strong-stomached person. I was not in my best physical shape last night either. I was certainly not planning on dog-bathing (twice), blanket & bed laundry (also twice), bathing myself (only once, but very long), dragging all the household fans into the hallway to wind-tunnel the stink out of the house (it took hours to clear), and giving the Yankee Candle Company the chance to show off how much skunk reek those votives are capable of covering up (not as much as one would hope).

None of this would have happened if I’d just gone to Knit Night instead.

Research ensued. Being a Louet dealer, I naturally put an S-95 Victoria at the top of the list… but there are other interesting travel wheels out there too – including (but not limited to) the SpinOlution Bee, the Majacraft Little Gem, Kromski’s Sonata, Schacht’s Sidekick. The Sidekick is a particularly intriguing design, and I was mightily tempted… but I am a bit of a traditionalist, and not a big fan of plastic, although for a travel wheel it makes perfect sense. (I hope I get to try one out at SOAR and give it the opportunity to change my mind.) The Sonata seemed a bit large for airline travel, but the price is very reasonable. The Little Gem is another interesting design, but I’ve had the chance to try one out and found that it didn’t really float my boat, if you know what I mean – it’s a nice enough wheel, but… well, I wouldn’t mind giving it a another chance to change my mind, just not right now. The SpinOlution Queen Bee is a fascinating and clever design, but it’s relatively heavy at 13lbs and I’m not sure I want that level of complexity in a travel wheel.

In the end, after waffling around a bit and looking anxiously at the days ticking by on the calendar, I decided to just go with what I know and ordered myself a Victoria.

Victoria, ready to spin

The Victoria is lovely in its simplicity – all the bits and doodads are pared away, leaving you with a clean, plain wheel. It sets up easily, with a minimum of fussing, and folds away in a couple of simple steps – pull off the bobbin & flyer, unlatch the locking pin and voila! instant flatness. The drive band is stretchy, so there’s no tension settings to worry about there, and you needn’t slack out the stretchy brake band to take the bobbin off… so when you set it up again, you don’t have to mess about with things to regain the tension settings you were using when you packed the wheel up before. Basically, it’s just about as foolproof as you can get.

I splurged and bought the carry bag that matches it. It is black, and not girly at all.

Victoria in her Travel Bag

I spent last night spinning away on it for a couple of hours, and there’s certainly an adjustment period for a spinner like me – I do most of my spinning on antique production wheels with their wickedly high ratios and large, heavy drive wheels; there’s no way any wee little travelling machine can stack up against that. It took a while to adjust to the smaller, lighter drive wheel and smooth the jerkiness out of my treadling.

I found the Victoria pulled a bit aggressively for the first layer on the bobbin, even with the brake set as low as it could go and still wind on, but as the bobbin began to fill we settled into an easier relationship and I started to relax and really get into it. After a while, I learned to ignore the hissing sound from the brake band – and luckily, Himself seems deaf to it and wasn’t disturbed while I spun right next to him in the living room; I do think he turned up the TV a bit.

I think Victoria and I are going to be quite happy traveling to SOAR together. Now, if I only had time to get something done for the damn Gallery and Fashion Show…

Pssst: want to see the whole unboxing process? Click here! Warning: extremely picture-heavy!