My Adventure With Flax

I really, really wanted to try spinning flax. I don't know why exactly. I love linen, but I knew I wasn't going to get anything like linen, so that couldn't be why. In any case, on my last trip out to Celeigh Wool, I allowed myself one bag of fibre and after some thought, I headed home with a strick of Euroflax long line flax.

I have to admit, my first experience with flax was pretty comical. I got back to my parents' farm where we were visiting and opened the bag - whew! - what a stink! The heat and tightly closed plastic bag had gathered hours worth of that flaxy smell. Heady, wonderful - ah, no, I don't think so. I called up Marg in a bit of a panic and left what was either a hilariously funny message or a horribly offensive one, depending on how you'd take it. At any rate, I asked if I were perhaps meant to air the flax out on the laundry line prior to spinning? Or perhaps wash it? And did it really always smell that way? I think I likened it horse manure . . . lots of it.

She kind of laughed at me. " I love the smell of flax!" she says. "It's supposed to smell like that!"

Oh.

She did advise me on how long to boil it once I had finished spinning it and that it wouldn't smell quite so strongly after that. And of course, she was absolutely right. It ended up lighter and softer and definitely not smelly.

Anyway, I did really enjoy spinning it and the smell did ease considerably once the strick was out of that suffocating plastic bag. It really just needed to breathe. I rolled it in a towel, like Marg recommended. Lee Juvan describes the various ways of dealing with a strick in her article for KnittySpin and that includes several photographs of how to wrap in a towel. I did find that my towel needed some hair elastics around it to keep it neat inside. Otherwise it kind of ended up as a bad hair day. A hairdresser's worst back-combing nightmare would be a good comparison. At any rate, once I kept the package rolled a bit more firmly it wasn't so bad and the flax pulled out fairly smoothly.

The unspun flax is quite stiff and hairy feeling, kind of like a horse's tail. The back-combed snarls I was getting seemed familiar too - kind of like trying to untangle that same horse's tail full of a winter's worth of snarls. It was kind of nerve wracking having to spin a whole bobbin full at one time. I rarely sit down for that long with three kids underfoot. I spun the flax wet, as recommended ( a towel on your lap is definitely handy!), which means that you need to get it off the bobbin as soon as you are done, or you risk warping your bobbin or having mildew attack your freshly spun flax. So I was a bit paranoid and went on a spinning marathon to finish each bobbin at one go. I wound the first two off on my niddy-noddy and left them skeined until I was done the third and ready to ply (a week later at least!). Then I wound them back on bobbins with my wheel and a swift.

Here are the yarn stats, all singles spun S, plied Z: 3-ply, 220 m, 12 to 14 wpi, 172 g, 640 ypp. I made up the last 20 g into a 2-ply once I ran out of the first bobbin's length, but I didn't write down how many metres I had before I wound it into a ball - oops!

I was aiming for a sportweight, but I ended up with more like a DK. It is much softer, but still a little bit stiff, and has a nice lustre, which sort of shows in the first photo. I am really happy with the end product though and if I ever get around to finishing up the projects I already have started, I want to make this bag, also by Lee Juvan and published in Knitty Spring 2008.

Catch-Up Time

Well, I finally have an hour or so to myself, so I am going to try and catch up with
some moments from my summer. This photo is one of my favourites.

Surf's up.

Life through brown-coloured glasses. Summer at the beach.

This is what happens when you are not watching.

The watermelon that wasn't.

He has been trying to grow watermelon (for years?) and finally succeeded,
even if it was inedible. A near miracle up here at 52 ° latitude.

Suspended

I took this photo a few weeks ago. I think it is so cool. How is it suspended there? Can you guess . . .

Play Silks

This afternoon, the youngest one had an impromptu nap. Taking advantage of the relative calm, knowing that my entire evening would be ruined as a result, the other two and I dyed the play silks I bought after the Waldorf camp last week. I think it was worth it!

We used Kool-Aid to dye the pink (Cherry) and green (Lemon-Lime) and used my Ashford dyes to dye the yellow-orange one. The blue one is from day-camp. They are truly lovely. We used hot water and vinegar to set the dye, with the exception that the orange one was also wrapped loosely in plastic wrap and microwaved for a bit and the green one was brought to almost a boil on the stove. The Ashford dyes bound very strongly to the silk and there was no residual dye in the rinse water at all.

A Gift For Your Feet

Well, really my friend's feet. She is coming up to visit this weekend and it happened to be her birthday the other day, which I purposefully neglected. I suppose I should have at least called her . . . Oh well, too late now and she'll be here tomorrow - yay!!! It is really a wonderful time when close friends come to stay. Even when it is only for a few minutes it brightens up hours and days either side of the visit! This time I am lucky and she's here for a whole day and a night with her fantastic family in tow. The kids can play and we can just visit. Lovely.

The blue reminds me of her somehow. Or maybe it's the swirling pattern in the fabric. I think it's because there are always traces of the ocean and blue sky in my head when I think of her. She is an island girl by birth and we met on an island nation. Surrounded by blue sea and canopied by blue sky, our families became fast friends. I'm not sure, all I know is that these have been hers since they began. I stitched the quilting in a swirling pattern that reminded me of New Zealand koru, my favourite Maori symbol. Koru is the Maori name for a new unfurling fern frond, which we call a fiddlehead. It symbolizes new life, growth, strength and peace. I think that it's perfect for the twice-transplanted Scottish girl that I met in New Zealand 10 years ago.

And Gawdess, I did not "just whip these ones up". Grin. You will be relieved to know that these have been languishing in my UFO pile for at least a year, along with another terribly cute pair in pink which are destined for my own feet. As usual I could not bring myself to follow the pattern properly, making a few tweaks here and there, but they are quite simple to make and they would be fast if you could make up your mind as to how you are going to pad the sole and make them not be too slippy. I didn't even screw up the binding as I usually do, thanks to lots and lots of steam ironing.


After lots of test stomping, I decided to use up some yucky polar fleece and some totally synthetic batting I had laying around for the sole padding - one layer of fleece and two of batting. To make the sole grippy, I used fabric with little rubber dots all over, the kind you find on the bottom of infant sleepers, rather than the vinyl called for in the pattern. I found it much easier to make it slide along the sewing machine platform if it had tissue paper under it. When I sewed it as the layer facing up, I used a teflon foot.

A New Banner

A few weeks ago we were painting rocks. Again. We seem to do this a lot in the summer out at the farm. I think it has to do with the millions of perfect rocks on the driveway. This time, though, I had a project in mind. I collected 26 lovely little stones and, voila!

Simple Moccasins

My son has been asking for moccasins for a while now and since I had a stash of leather in the basement, I whipped these up. In total it took about 1 hour, maybe two. They are nothing so beautiful as the ones at our historical site, but they are sturdy moosehide and should last a while. Beaded beauties they are not though!