That old yarn

I haven't been to an agricultural show for at least a decade, and last time I did I was too old to get excited about showbags, rides on the whizzamagig and foodlike substances on sticks, but, on the other hand, I hadn't yet settled into my early-onset nanna-esque enthusiasm for produce displays and vintage machinery. Thirty-six, it turns out, is the perfect age for enjoying agricultural shows, and the Whittlesea Show today was a delight. I got to witness from afar the latest fairground cuisine (variations on deep-fried fairy-floss). The arts & crafts competition displays were glorious, esp. in the Best Decorated Orange or Potato category, the Fair Isle sock display, the carrot cake competition, and the great Orstrayan backyard dunny division. There were fewer exhibits of baby animals being terrorised by kids than I'd feared, and the weather was on the chilly side of 15ºC (thank you v. much, southerly change), which meant that the handsome, hand-brushed Poll Herefords standing around with no shade or water weren't suffering unduly. And - finally - there was an alpaca display, including a coven of spinsters transforming alpaca fluff into a very respectable yarn.

Which was just what I needed, being myself a struggling novice in the alpaca-yarn spinning department. I made some inroads about a week ago, after watching several bajillion instructional youtube videos on setting up my spinning wheel, carding fleece, making rolags (rolags!), and spinning itself. But even so, this meagre length of yarn -

- was all I could make before I stopped in frustration. The yarn kept breaking, and, uncoordinated at the best of times, I was finding it nigh impossible to pedal with one foot, use both hands to pinch the rolag into something finer and threadlike, not slow my pedalling down so that the wheel started going backwards, deploy my third hand to grab the next rolag and introduce it, scratch behind my ear etc, and remain upright. Hand-foot-eye-machine synchronisation, never my strong suit.

At some point in this dogforsaken initiation into spinning I gave up, grabbed an old ball of  Patons 5-ply and started knitting this bedsock, on which I made tremendous progress at last week's poetry-at-the-pub, with the aid of my trusty book of sock patterns, I Can't Believe I'm Knitting Socks.

If only there were a companion volume, I Can't Believe I'm Spinning Alpaca Fleece.

So, anyway, it was very comforting to speak to the alpaca spinners today and discover a few things: (1) everyone finds spinning hard at first; (2) noone learns to spin from youtube; (3) alpaca wool isn't your optimal beginner's fibre, given its tendency to break, whereas sheep's wool consists of cells that make the wool stick together (or something); and (4) there is such an institution as the Hand Weavers and Spinners Guild of Victoria, headquartered in Melbun, and I could take lessons or join a local group and bludge lessons for free. So I think that's now my plan: I will put the gigantic sack of alpaca fleece back in the cupboard, wait until the new year when the next term of Wednesday evening spinning lessons start, and in the meantime, if I'm stricken down with yarn nerdery, I'll use up some of the commercial wool I've been accumulating over the decades in a flurry of sock manufacturing. I might try treadling my spinning wheel at the same time, just to get my foot in.

Meanwhile, in other news: Spring! The season of empinkification in the front yard.

The season of bees in apple-blossom (except for the apple-blossom that didn't eventuate because the earwigs of doom climbed up the trunks in the night and ate the unopened flower buds ... bloody earwigs).

And t'is the season of Esme Australorp deciding to incubate the next generation of chooklings with her whole soul and self. Esme can't be photographed, because she has planted herself in the darkest farthest corner of the coop and will be enormously disaffected if I open the portal that lets light in on her (whirr, fluff, dinosaur impersonation). We procured for her eight fertilised eggs last Sunday, so that the sitting could produce something other than rotten eggs; she broke two by accident on her first day, settling in, but all's gone well ever since, and she's almost a third of the way through the incubation now with six eggs still intact. She is a model of endurance. The whole incubation involves 21 days of sitting, turning the eggs over now and then so the embryos don't stick to the shell, holding in her poos, her thirst, her hunger, her need to stretch, her desperate need for a dustbath, until that brief moment in the afternoon when it's warm enough to leave the eggs and she can dash out and get a day's worth of living compressed into twenty minutes. Puts my frustrations with the alpaca fleece and the spinning wheel of contrariety right in their place.

Basket weaving for mandarin eaters

My mum's been keenly following the adventures of a family of sea-eagles on whose highrise Sydney nest is trained a live-streaming sea-eagle cam (here, for those of you who need a bit of sea-eagle voyeurism in your lives). Every so often the family ornithologist emails my sisters and me an update: the egg's hatched!, the father's just brought back a dead fish!, the chick's taken up violin! I was very impressed to learn from Mum yesterday that the sea-eagles' nest is now six feet wide. That's, like, 183cm or so in the new money. Big! It's a truly impressive structure, woven out of sticks that have somehow stayed together through storms and rain, the comings and goings of a pair of grown-up sea-eagles, and the shenanigans of the baby sea-eagle (who, admittedly, doesn't seem to be doing much besides eating bits of regurgitated fish).

As a person with reproductive designs of my own, I see this nest as something of a challenge. Being able to weave a vaguely permanent structure out of natural fibres is clearly a vital parenting prerequisite, and one I lack. I was pondering all this yesterday as we wandered under the willows along the gully near Ma Harlot's place. Long yellow willow wands, just sprouting their spring leaves, were hanging from the trees like hair and a good scattering of these had detached from the trees and were lying on the ground. These fresh lengths of pliable wood looked like pretty perfect stuff for some amateur nest-smithing.

Or basket-smithing. Back when I were a wee lad, basket-weaving was regularly cited as the height of pointless hippy dilettantism, than which there is no better incentive for a person of my proclivities to wangle some natural fibres into a vaguely bowl-shaped mess. So, behold, my pointless hippy dilettante basket-making method:

1. I make two wreathes of roughly equal circumference. A wreath is just three or so lengths of willow, twisted together into a circle, with the ends tucked in.

2. I fit one wreath around another so that they form right angles (one wreath will form the keel and the handle of the basket, and the other will form the rim of the bowl). At this point I rummage around in my mother's kitchen cupboards until I find her string (although a purist would be using her  own nettle cordage), and secure the wreathes together with a God's-eye lashing.

(For those who skipped the God's-eye-lashing chapter of Girl Guides, there's a neato instruction video here.)

3. I extend the God's eye with some more willow. (It's not really bendy enough for this to work well, but, hey, we amateur sea eagles can't aspire to instant perfection.)

4. I cut some lengths of willow and use these to make the ribs of the bowl. The ends of the ribs get tucked into the messy God's eye lashing, so it helps to make these ends a bit pointy and to make the God's eye fairly substantial.

5. Beginning at one end of the bowl, close to the handle/keel and bowl-rim conjunction, I fold a length of willow in half and begin weaving it back and forth between the ribs. With my next length, I start at the conjunction on the other side. The ribs are at risk of popping out of their God's-eye anchors during this process, but they can be tucked back in again, and as the weaving progresses it secures the ribs.

And so, ta da!, a basket:

While it may not be quite the thing for a family of sea-eagles, it's perfect for mandarins or other things like mandarins (though I should note that when I offered it to my mother for just this purpose, she politely rejected it, which casts some suspicion over whether she really did think the spray-painted macaroni jewellery I gave her for Christmas '82 was the height of fashion).

Nettleware for the Discerning Gentleman

You may have heard tell of our enviable nettle surfeit. Yep, we have a nettle surfeit, if indeed it's possible to have too much of such a useful friend (I mean, the stings alone ... way to conquer your crippling ennui). Having exhausted the possibilities of nettle pesto, nettle soup, nettle gnocci, steeped nettle liquid fertiliser, nettle tea, nettle spanakopita, and nettles in your nemesis's pillow (I'd never, the waste), I was pretty darn excited to read on Asparaguspea that nettle string is a thing. And a thing that uses up the fibres from the nettle stalks while the leaves are put to more gustatory purposes, no less.

I don't quite have the time/patience to hand-spin enough nettle string for a whole shirt, though that would be the excellentest thing, and if ever I have an engrossing 156-hour cult tv series in a boxed DVD set that I have to watch for, erm, work, then I Will Do It (nettle shirts for all!). In the meantime, I figured a nettle coronet might be do-able, King Lear style:

Alack, 'tis he: why, he was met even now

As mad as the vex'd sea; singing aloud;

Crown'd with rank fumiter and furrow-weeds,

With bur-docks, hemlock, nettles, cuckoo-flowers,

Darnel, and all the idle weeds that grow

In our sustaining corn. 

If this is the kind of challenge you're up for, then first you have to source your nettles. As they're not being eaten, you don't have to worry about their glyphosate-and/or-lead-free status so much, which is good, because there are few things so fine as tromping along delightful, but possibly slightly toxified, gullies with a sturdy nettle-receptacle over your arm and a pair of gloves on your paws. You'll be looking for the longer nettle stems. Midgy ones aren't much use. And you'll want to watch the patch of skin between the cuff of your sleeve and the top of your glove. By the way.

Once you have a goodly supply of nettles, you remove the leaves (good for eating if from a reliable source, or composting if not), and then peel the outer fibre - the epidermis - off the stalks in strips as long as you can make 'em. I kept my gloves on for the leaf removal, but didn't worry too much for the stem-skinning.

And then let them dry over night. And then, the next day, take a strip, fold it over in the middle to make a loop and then start twisting the two halves around each other from the loop down towards the loose ends of the fibre. When you're a few centimetres from the ends, you introduce another strip, folded over in half again to make a U-shape, then insert the U into your prior twist, and then ... okay, too complicated. See here for clear instructions on how to make your own personal cordage out of whatever you fancy.

By now, on the "one, two, skip a few, ninety-nine, a hundred" principle of nettle-coronet-manufacture, you will have a length of nettle string. Ta da!

 

Now, for the super complicated bit: you corner your King Lear substitute, assess her/his mental health and parenting philosophy (you don't want anyone you know to be too much of a King Lear substitute) and then you wrap your nettle crown around the crowny bits of her/his head. Double ta da!

Tim, practising for his career as a Sad Etsy Boyfriend, not that I am going to attempt to sell my bodgo nettle crown on Etsy, now that I have seen that Etsy lists this machine-spun nettle yarn of splendour.

Verdict: my technique needs work, but nettle-based textiles and I have a future.

Eggswax

You know those pairs of photos that appear now and then on the internet: the first one depicts an award-winning baby, cooing and gurgling as she leans out of a perfectly chiseled pumpkin; the next one is an attempted replica - a grizzly infant looking like he's just been bottle-fed lemon juice and fish oil, covered in the disintegrating gloop of a mismanaged cucurbit? This kind of thing. The moral is: if you're not a professional baby/pumpkin wrangler with a top-notch camera and a lot of clean cheesecloth wherewith to conceal the less photogenic aspects of your house, do not try citrouille au enfant at home. And if you do try this at home, do not display your attempts on the internet, unless you want to propagate international mirth, which is quite a reasonable desire. (Alternatively, the moral is: do unto babies as you would have done unto your good self on an equivalent scale, which might mean not imprisoning your naked infant within a giant fruit.)

So, this is one of those blog posts. I show you someone's stylish craft project, and then I show you my surely-I-can-do-that attempt, which, of course, falls pretty flat.

Here is the stylish craft project, Easter egg candles, ftw, all the way from Lithuania:

Artful photo of pastel vegetable wax candles in eggshells from here.

I saw these candles in my daily Etsy digest a few weeks ago, and realised immediately that not only did I possess a goodly supply of eggshells (thanks, Shirley Chook, our champion layer of the month), and a goodly supply of wax (thanks, bees), and a goodly supply of devil-may-care crafty can-do pluck, but I also had an Easter coming up, and various dear relations, who would surely appreciate receiving some stylish, handcrafted Easter table decor, made from eggshells and beeswax. Because nothing says hope and resurrection like an ovum membrane filled with stuff from the abdominal glands of insects.

It turns out not to be very easy to hold a bit of wick right in the middle of half an eggshell while pouring molten beeswax around it, so some of my wicks are sort of akimbo. It's also quite hard (given our amateur wax rendering skills) to completely rid beeswax of all the non-wax gunk that comb accumulates, so my wax is not so much golden, as baby-poo brown - caramel, if we're feeling charitable - and it contains bits and pieces of bee residue you'd probably rather not know about.

So them's my candles. They'd probably look a bit better if posed in the presence of cinnamon quills and raffia, and they'd probably look a lot better if I too had used vegetable wax in various alluring shades of pastel rather than beeswax in various unalluring shades of slumgum. In the end, I decided not to impose them on my dear relations, because I want to keep them sweet for the cat hair textiles I'll be knitting them all for Christmas.