From Sheep to Cloth

my name is Wayne handler and I have been playing with fibers since about 1975 I moved to Maryland and I was always a lifelong knitter and that was the beginning and I began to have a few sheep in my front yard and and Here I am just wallowing in sheep and up to my ears and fleece and yarn and you know that's just part of who I am we do the shearing of this particular beauty we share once a year and we share them in February my Shearer Kevin Ford is an itinerant and he comes from Massachusetts and he comes in the morning and he shares my feet an English Lester Lester long wool sheep is an old British breed was brought to this country it became extinct in 1950s ladies and then it was reintroduced by Colonial Williamsburg in the 1990s so we shear the sheep and we kind of pick through the faeces take off the edges and that we skirt the fleeces and then they'll go into bags with their name or number on them and then at some point they will be spun now go to washings and then I'll do two rinses I wash them in very hot water with soap white and then I let it let the fleece sit there and it floats pretty freely I don't pack it in and then I will squeeze the water out and lay it out to dry carting this kind of wool this Lester long will is a six to nine inch staple length so you usually would card this so that the fibers are just straight and laid out I spin it Worcester style so it's just spun by pulling the fiber out and twisting it rather than woollen style where it's rolled up into a spiral and then fold for me to spin I spin on it on a Saxony wheel you know it's spinning it's just a very personal thing there's lots of variation in the way it looks it can be very very uniform and precise it can be thick it can be thin and it could be both all in the same strand there's lots of different you know it's just different this s people there were two spinners in every household at one point in history everybody learned to spin they would sit by the fire and the little girls would spin and that was part of the family work I don't do much spinning anymore because when I have 200 pounds of fleece it's easier for me since that's not the part I love so I move on to the step of sending it to a mill now I have that I have a local mill been such a Renaissance of the whole fiber tradition particularly on the East Coast that the mills have sprung up all over this is a wonderful thing because you didn't have the Sheep showing on Saturday and take the wool to the mill on Monday to be spoon when I first started I think I got my yarn in six weeks and now you might wait through nuts you could have it spun into comb and placed on phones or you can have it spun into skeins which can be whatever size you want I have four ounce games you can have eight ounce games you know they're pretty custom about what they'll do for you spinning it turns it into yarn as opposed to unspun fiber it turns it into a thread when I diet you all I have to I have to get my mindset ready I have to think about spring colors or fall colors and then I have to clean everything else out of my life and usually it's a day when no one else is around because when you're dyeing wool you can't do anything else you can't think about anything else because they're it's such a an involved process and you have to keep it moving I start with the water I get the water hot I add salt to the water and then they will stay in the dye pot for me I do around a half an hour in the dye and then I'll add vinegar as my Morden hortence makes the cell of the fiber open up and accept the dye and when the yarn has absorbed all the dye that's in the water I carefully take the little out of the water and I put it in a sink and I rinse it and I'll gently squeeze the water out and I hang it out to dry so if a scarf is 70 inches long I know that you need a yard and a half a loom waste so that's roughly three and a half yards then you measure the warp and you have to figure out how many threads you want per inch so there's a little more math lots of math here and say if it's eight inches wide and I'm doing eight to the inch 64 threads three and a half yards long so I use a warping reel and I have planned out a guide string that tells me when I have three and a half yards then I dress the loom it's called dressing the loom I spread them out on the front beam or the breast beam and I will put the threads through the slots in the Reed and then they go through the hetal's which the heddle frame raise and lower the harnesses so that you can have your basic over-under pattern and then I tie on to the back of the loom and then I will wind the war up onto the loom and tie it in the front tension it and begin to weave the warp is what you put on the loom and the weft or roof is the part that you weave we even actually is the easiest part of a process once you have it all set up in your mind it becomes very rhythmic is if you're doing a simple pattern what we call plain weave is just very pleasant pleasurable to leave there's one treadle for harness and so when you push down the treadle it raises whatever harness you've assigned it to you have sixteen treadle and eight harnesses on my loom so you have a lot of variations in what you can raise and lower you can have a color pattern that's just changing changing their threads but you can also have a pattern that's constructed by the raising and lowering specific harnesses no amount of money is worth what I just put into it you know they're kind of like your children you know unnecessarily want to let them go and it's very difficult to price things I try to think that it's all about the learning and if I'm having fun making it and somebody's willing to give me money for it that's okay I like I guess because it's berry of the earth I guess I could grow up and live in an apartment and not have a farm and be able to come and go as I wanted but when you have a farm you know you have a lifetime of creativity that you put into this place and you know it's it's it's a very different magnitude of investment it's kind of nice to sit here like in the winter when the fire is going and it's snowing and I can see the sheep it's just brings it full circle

Channel: Handcraftedtradition

Views: 319,854

Rating: 4.9398746 out of 5

Keywords: Ken Koons, Leicester Longwool, Sheep, shearing, Gwen Handler, weaving, spinning

Id: ngLoJxssEao

Length: 13min 24sec (804 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 24 2014