Roc Day

Traditionally, Roc Day (or St. Distaff's Day), is observed on the day after The Twelfth Day (or January 7). It signals the final blowout before Christmas is declared to be Done, Over, Finished, Kaput, Stick a Fork in It (which is a good twelve days after I, personally, declare it to be over). The poet Robert Herrick wrote long ago about St. Distaff's Day as a transition from feasting and celebrating, back to every day life, thusly:

Partly worke and partly play
Ye must on S. Distaffs day:
From the Plough soone free your teame;
Then come home and fother them.
If the Maides a spinning goe,
Burne the flax, and fire the tow:
Scorch their plackets, but beware
That ye singe no maiden-haire.
Bring in pailes of water then,
Let the Maides bewash the men.
Give S. Distaffe all the right,
Then bid Christmas sport good-night.
And next morrow, every one
To his own vocation
 
In modern times, crafters often get together to spin and indulge in fibery pursuits on (or near) Roc Day, and this year I was lucky enough to join my guild (the Prairie Arts Fiber Guild) in Groton, SD, for the day. Happily, there were no men to bewash (and I'd be doing something more dire to anyone who was foolish enough to burn my flax anyway). But the weather (hovering near zero, sometimes just above, sometimes just below, but with no wind and no new snow) permitted 22 of us to gather for a day of fun and wool fumes.
 

 No matter what else happens when spinners get together, there is always a spinning circle. Here, Shay, Julie, Marie, Celeste, and Connie do what spinners do. Five spinners, three different wheel styles.

 Young spinner Hannah spun and plied yarn yarns on a drop spindle. Her mom, Malissa crocheted, and Jill used yet another style of wheel.

 Rose, Betty (from my knitting group), Brandy, and Dianne worked and talked and laughed. Brandy was knitting mitts, and Diane was crocheting a shawl. Two more wheels... I wish Mary could have been there, she would have come away feeling much more confident about her own wheel. Well, actually, I wish Mary could have been there just because. Karen too.

 Some of us spent time wet-felting armbands for the board members to wear at the next NCFF.  Dianne, Brandy, Hannnah and Kelly (wearing her armband), watched as Malissa cut the felting base patterns from an old sheet.

 Kelly's arm band, un-armed, is a simple length of felt, with a couple of buttons. Easy-peasy.

 We layered our wool on top of the cloth pattern, and then covered it with a screen.

 and then we sprinkled it with soapy water from handy devices we dubbed Snot Suckers (because... obviously). And then we applied elbow grease. We rubbed and kneaded and pushed and rolled and added more soap, and massaged, and complained about our aching shoulders, and we shocked the piece in alternate hot and cold water baths, and rubbed them on washboards, and observed our pruney fingers.

 And in the end, we had lovely more-or-less rectangular pieces of felt. Mine will go to a board member- I'll be interested to see how she finishes and embellishes it. All that felting gave me a notion for making felted wrist bands with the Grandgirls, next time they come out to the farm. I think they'd love making them (and their hands would definitely be clean afterwards).

 I had time to spin too. I took a hank of Twisted Fiber Arts  Puffy (merino) roving, painted in the Valkyrie colorway. (note the nifty chair cushion).

 I was able to spin a bobbin of lovely singles. I'm not going to try to make this a self-patterning yarn. I'm just going to let the colors develop as they may. I'll probably knit hats or a scarf with it, so matching isn't important.

I also contributed fiber for a Fiber Sandwich. 4 ozs of donated fiber from each person playing was pooled and mixed and then divided back again, into 4 oz bundles, and redistributed. I didn't have time to start spinning this lovely bunch, but I'm looking forward to it. And I'm looking forward to seeing what everyone else does with their Sandwich fibers. If you give 10 spinners the same wool, you're going to get 10 different yarns back. That's part of the fun.
 
We also had far too much good food (which I did not record for posterity, owing to the fact that I was eating too much of it),  and a whole lot of laughter (which also doesn't photograph well).
 
All in all, it was an excellent Roc Day. And no one's tow* was fired.
 
 
*for the non-fibery among Blog Readers, tow here refers to jumbled linen fibers (which come from flax)
 
Also for the non-fibery people who read all the way to the bottom of a post that is all about fiber, Disney notwithstanding, Sleeping Beauty did not prick her finger on a spindle. She pricked her finger on the Distaff (the tall upright thingie, to which linen fibers are tied, for spinning).

NCFF 2009- Part 1, Fiber Sandwich

What a wonderful weekend I had in Watertown, at NCFF. The fiber fair is growing steadily, and has expanded to holding classes on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. I wasn't able to get there until Saturday, where I taught an All-Day Fair Isle (I'm also teaching that one in North Carolina at SAFF next month). On Sunday, I had a booksigning. I saw old friends, made new ones, bought some fiber, did some knitting, got out the wheel, ate a really good catered supper (the best I've ever had at NCFF), modeled in the style show, and, in general, had a marvelous, and exhausting time (I opted not to spend the night, so driving back and forth was a bit much: 300 miles in 2 days... next time I'll get a room).

So first up: As a fundraiser for NCFF, vendors and spinners donated up to 4ozs of any kind of fiber for the Fiber Sandwich (the only restriction was that it had to be spinnable... in other words, not fresh from the sheep- and yes, I know you can spin in the grease, but that wouldn't have worked for this project). Volunteers (every portion of this event was volunteer), fluffed, distributed, and spread the donated fibers in layers on a table.

I heard that there was about 4lbs of fiber total, every kind: natural wool, dyed wool, llama, angora rabbit, mohair, glitz, camel, silk, and possibly, space alien.

The table full of fluff was divided into 4 oz bags and distributed to the volunteer spinners. The original deadline was to spin the 4ozs of fiber into any kind of yarn the spinner desired, by 1:00pm Saturday. That proved to be just a little bit impossible (an understatement...) so the deadline was extended to 2:00pm on Sunday. I was teaching an all-day class, but with the deadline extension (and knowing that I could squeeze a little spinning in over lunch, during breaks, and after class was over), I signed up, happy to do my part to support NCFF by donating the finished skein to a silent auction at the end of the Fiber Fair. It was a wonderful fund-raising plan, but one that could have been tweaked even further- I wanted to spin that stuff so badly, that I would have PAID to do it... just sayin'...

At any rate, it turned out that I had some blocks of time during the all-day class (as I waited for the students to catch up to me, or each other, so that we could all work on an important step together), that I was able to spin during the day as well. I can spin and talk at the same time, so it worked out fine (in fact, try to get me to shut up... Go ahead... try it...)

Since there was a deadline on the spinning, and I didn't take the time (or have the equipment) to card my fibers, I just grabbed random handfulls, fluffed them a bit more, and spun the stuff as it came. This made for a lumpy/bumpy yarn, which is not my favorite sort of spinning, though I do love the yarns that result from that kind of experimentation. I happened to have a bobbin full of already spun singles, so most of my 4ozs was spun and then plied with those pre-spun singles. But the last bit of leftover fiber sandwich was plied back onto itself. I was given 4 ozs of fiber, and turned in 2 skeins with 5.3 ozs of yarn.

This is my large skein.

Giving 14 spinners the same fiber and telling them to make whatever yarn they like from it, is like giving 14 knitters all the same yarn and telling them to knit. I was fascinated by the different yarns produced by the spinners- all of them beautiful. Here some of them are, drying in the sun, before the auction (washing made a huge difference in these skeins- they were definitely in need of blooming, and the odd whack against the side of the building).

A closeup of one particularly beautiful skein.

Unfortunately, I left on Sunday before the Silent Auction ended, but I saw the signup sheets, and know that every single skein had a bid (some of them hefty), and they raised at least a couple hundred dollars for the fair. Which is wonderful.