Crafts in Paksworld: Yarn

Posted: December 21st, 2013 under Background.
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Herdwick-yarn-12-21-13

Yarn spun from the wool of Herdwick sheep, purchased from Crookabeck Farm.

This is close to the kind of yarn that Paks would have learned to knit socks and darn them with.   This yarn is undyed–the lighter yarn from older sheep, the darker from younger.   In the uplands of northern Tsaia and Fintha, and southern Fintha into the foothills, the sheep would have to be hardy and tough, like the Herdwick breed, and their fleece would probably have been fairly coarse, not soft and silky.

Paks’s family sold fleeces, not finished yarn, to a contractor who came to Rocky ford or Three Firs (more rarely) to buy from the hill farms.   But they kept back wool to be combed and spun and then made into garments by the family members.    Spinning would be largely by drop spindle, but the spinning wheel–if a family owned one–was a treasure.

Paks’s family also sold sheep for meat “down the valley” or traded them for other meat and supplies.

In the larger towns and cities, lowland fleeces would be spun into finer yarns, and the yarn dyed, then sent to weavers to make into furls of cloth of various qualities.   The upland sheep and goat breeds would have their fleeces spun hardly finer than Paks’s mother could spin,  some dyed and some not,  and made into carpets and tent canvas and coarser cloth for garments.   Duke Phelan bought the coarser, but very hard-wearing and weather-resistant cloth for uniforms, the recruits’ uniforms either from dark undyed, or more likely brown-dyed yarn, and the regulars’ uniforms in maroon.

This yarn certainly can be dyed, though I like the natural colors of the fleece…for now.  If I like the yarn as much as I think I will,  I may try dyeing it myself.   Crookabeck Farm does special-order dyeing, but it’s pricey.

Herdwick lambs are born black, so the first shearing (which I didn’t buy) is much darker than the dark above.    It would be fun to have some of that, too, but again…pricey.

When I’ve knit some of this, I’ll post a picture.    At any rate, this gives you an idea of the everyday working farmer’s yarn, and an idea of what people working in a field might be wearing.  The better-off would have some colored clothes; the poorest would have these soft earthy colors.

29 Comments »

  • Comment by Jonathan Schor — December 21, 2013 @ 6:02 pm

    1

    I looked up the source – English wool! Aren’t there sheep on the west coast? Seems like you will have to write another Paks book to pay for it all.

    Have a safe and happy holiday season.


  • Comment by Annabel Smyth — December 21, 2013 @ 6:37 pm

    2

    Would Paks’ mother have done any weaving, or did she trade it out to a specialist weaver in return for spun yarn or even fleece? Our did the family wear all knitted garments?

    And what was worn in the hot weather? Was there an equivalent to cotton or linen? Or silk, for the wealthy? I forget what was worn in the UK before cotton became available, but I think linen was widespread.


  • Comment by AThornton — December 21, 2013 @ 6:46 pm

    3

    The as-seen color and it’s vibrancy can be manipulated during weaving by juxtapositioning warp and weft threads. A piece of cloth can be made to “shimmer” by, e.g., having different hues of the “the same” color in the warp from dark to light and back to dark in a bird’s eye tie-up and carefully throwing the weft. A dark and muddy colored thread can be made light and interesting by surrounding it with white, contrasting, and/or complimentary dyed or natural colored threads.

    Like all crafts, the knowledge, skill, and ‘wanna’ of the craftsperson goes a long way in determining the final quality of cloth.


  • Comment by elizabeth — December 21, 2013 @ 7:12 pm

    4

    Jonathan: There are wool sheep in various places in the US–and around here, angora goats, some of the camelids, and others from whom yarn can be made. When I lived in South Texas, my mother knew a woman whose parents raised Samoyeds for show (a weird place to raise such thick-coated dogs) and she spun and then wove the combings…some of the prettiest yarn I’d ever seen combined Samoyed combings with silver poodle (producing a shimmery-moonlight effect) and Samoyed with apricot poodle (a warm golden-peach color.) I have a pound of undyed, handspun wool from Our Lady of the Rock Monastery on Shaw Island in Washington State.

    But I’ve been following @herdyshepherd1 on Twitter. He mentioned that their Herdwick sheep’s wool was not like all other wools, so…I was determined to learn more and buy some and try it out.

    Annabel: Paks’s mother did weave, but she may have used a hip loom, not a standing loom (the hip loom is used in parts of Mexico and I’ve seen one demonstrated.) If she had a more elaborate loom, it was not as big as many I’ve seen and would produce cloth probably less than 30 inches wide.

    Hot weather clothing: less was often the simplest solution. In some areas, wool was worn year around, but in others linen was a common warm-weather alternative. Silk was expensive and a rare fabric except for the very wealthy; there was another vegetable fiber much like cotton in the way it could be worked. It grew in Aarenis, and had not yet made inroads into the cloth market in the north.

    AThornton: My concept of Paksworld is that “weaving” ran the gamut from very simple small looms to large standing looms capable of producing elaborate brocades (like the cloth that had been made into a court robe for Duke Verrakai) with weavers ranging from just capable of producing a plain weave to those skilled enough to make multiple patterns in many colors. I don’t weave, but I have watched weavers at work (there was a woman in town when we moved here who had a shop where the big loom took up half the floor, and there were two smaller ones) and I have always been amazed at how many ways there are to cross threads and end up with fabric. Life is short, art is long, or I would take up weaving just to understand it.


  • Comment by Linda — December 22, 2013 @ 12:31 pm

    5

    … and before there was weaving, there was felting (which I enjoy enormously).

    Thanks for inspiring me to learn more about Herdwicks .. I had known about Beatrix Potter, the National Trust, rugs, etc. but the black lambs, territorial behavior of ewes and effects of hoof and mouth on the breed were new to me. Thanks also to Wikipedia.

    I’ll be curious to hear about knitting with the yarn. Some of my felting starts with raw fleece (which I get for free) and getting it clean etc. is quite a process. I’m just as glad not to have to spin it too.


  • Comment by Karen — December 22, 2013 @ 5:37 pm

    6

    I’m curious about dying techniques in Paksworld.

    We all know about Girdish blue, but I can’t help wondering if that was inspired by indigo dying techniques or was more akin to the colors that come from woad.

    (I ask because your description of dying in Paksworld reminded me that the smells associated with the cheapest/easiest method of creating a “reduction” dye vat for use with indigo required dyers to locate outside cities proper because of the flies and the stench — and because I’ve always wondered exactly what shade Girdish blue actually was).


  • Comment by Wickersham's Conscience — December 22, 2013 @ 6:25 pm

    7

    Some years ago, my wife and I took an hot afternoon off from birding outside Oaxaca, Mexico to visit a tradición artesanal spinning and weaving center. They worked goat, sheep, llama and vicuña fur. They did all the spinning, dyeing and weaving by hand and produced gorgeous stuff. All the dyes were natural products, and produced stunning colors. I remember one mushroom produced a brilliant, deep blue.

    Wonderful people, wonderful work. If you ever visit Teotitlan, stop by El Encanto.


  • Comment by elizabeth — December 22, 2013 @ 10:58 pm

    8

    Linda: So far knitting with the yarn is amazing, because the surface feel and the actual effect on my fingers do not compute…though the initial feel is “This is harsh stuff,” the lanolin content has already partly healed a spot on my right hand’s fourth finger where ordinary yarn abrades below the fingernail and causes hangnails. It is a heavier yarn than I’ve used before, as well as being a different type of wool…so I’m knitting with Aran weight on US #5 needles, at about 5.5 stitches/inch, for a very dense fabric (but still flexible enough to make a sock, I think…I’m still working on the swatch, about to switch to ribbing for several rows to see what happens. I usually make socks with worsted weight on the size 5s, with 6.5 to 7 stitches/inch. (I’ll rip out the swatch, dampen and ease out the kinks, then use it for the socks, since I’m not sure how much will be needed.) The black lambs, with those white ears–adorable. What I noticed was how wide the face is below the eyes, compared to other breeds (especially the ones I see here in the county ag shows.)

    Karen: I’m not expert enough in dyeing techniques to speak to all possibilities for Girdish dyers. I do know people in the SCA who have done dyeing, but my knowledge isn’t beyond what I’ve been told and read (which isn’t a lot of the technical stuff, so I haven’t tried to push Paksworld past this world in terms of the techniques.) However, I’ve fascinated by what my friend R- is doing right now with yarn, including a disassembled thrift-shop sweater as source of said yarn. So dyeing is probably in my future.

    Wickersham’s Conscience: Wow! That sounds like a great experience and source of good information for anyone who goes there. Thanks for the information.


  • Comment by AThornton — December 23, 2013 @ 12:40 am

    9

    Karen:

    The deepness of indigo blue depends on how many times the yarn or cloth is dipped in the dye bath and removed. The more times, the deeper the color. Removing forces the dye to react with oxygen and it is the indigo and oxygen that causes the color to fuse with the proteins in the wool. Indigo does not need a mordant but using them: alum lemon juice, vinegar, copper, iron, cream of tartar, baking soda, ammonia, urine, etc., allows the creation of subtle variations in color.

    I have never dyed with woad. I am told using the recipes for indigo will achieve the same results. Since the chemical is the same in both plants that kinda figures.

    Interestingly, perhaps, woad is antiseptic. That’s one reason Celtic and Germanic warriors would paint their bodies with woad before going into battle, it would help to prevent wounds from being infected. So if there is a woad-equivalent in Paksworld at some point some people – Horse Nomads? Old Humans? – sometime, somewhere, who did the same. Can it be speculated the reason blue was forbidden wasn’t the color, exactly, but the fact the Mages didn’t want revolting farmers to have access to it due to its healing qualities?


  • Comment by Margaret Middleton — December 23, 2013 @ 10:07 am

    10

    Re dog fur: I remember hearing an interview years ago on NPR with a lady who’d been experimenting with spinning and knitting dog hair. Her favorite came from Shetland Sheepdogs. Not only did it hang-together well in the spinning, it came in quite a range of natural colors.

    Re hot weather clothing: I’ve read of a fabric called linsey-woolsey, which was common back when cotton still had to have its seeds hand-removed and both flax and wool were commonly grown close to the weaving apparatus. The loom was strung [I think] with linen thread, and woven with wool. Or I could be remembering that backwards [grin].


  • Comment by Tuppenny — December 23, 2013 @ 10:43 am

    11

    Nettles were also a source of fiber. From what I have read, the cloth was actually considered to be better than linen.


  • Comment by LarryP — December 23, 2013 @ 8:24 pm

    12

    it makes me wonder if the hair form a long hair cat could be made into yarn…they do leave hair ropes every so often. I do mean the hair form the out side of the cat just to clear.


  • Comment by elizabeth — December 23, 2013 @ 9:33 pm

    13

    Margaret: The woman I met had tried multiple breeds of dogs, and said collie underfur would work, but the Arctic breeds really had some advantages for the base of the yarn–hence Samoyeds. Of course, because her parents bred and showed Samoyeds, she had access to a LOT of combings from them. I think my collie’s undercoat would have worked, but he had died by the time I met her. And I had no interest in spinning (then.) The outer hair on all breeds, she said, was “hair” and not wool–like ours. But breeds that had a thick undercoat in winter had something in common with sheep wool in how it reacted to spinning.

    Tuppenny: Nettles, and also hemp, a major source of fiber for cordage and cloth until all the panic about marijuana. It’s still possible to buy canvas made of hemp (and the fiber comes from the stalk.) Thanks for reminding me about nettles–and wasn’t there something else…?

    LarryP: If you have a cat whose undercoat sheds in summer, and you comb it out–yes, but it takes more than you think. I would be someone with 20 Maine Coon cats could store up enough to spin and actually do something with it. I don’t know what the minimum fiber length is for effective spinning; when I was a kid, they grew long-staple cotton where I grew up, but it had to be hand-picked. The plants grow too tall for mechanical cotton pickers, and the bolls don’t ripen in as short a time frame. When they went to mechanical cotton pickers, they switched the type of cotton grown to a short-staple cotton that grew to a lower uniform height, could be defoliated in one pass, harvested in one pass, and then tilled under for boll weevil control.


  • Comment by PamelaL — December 23, 2013 @ 9:49 pm

    14

    I have Shetland Sheepdogs and the undercoat does make lovely yarn. I was most surprised by how warm the gloves I knitted from it were. Much too warm for ordinary Northern California wearing but just right for cold mornings herding sheep. There was a local woman who would take any kind of dog hair and blend it with alpaca to make yarn but she passed away. The Irish setter yarn I saw was very pretty.


  • Comment by Sherri Campbell — December 24, 2013 @ 1:29 am

    15

    You should look into yarn from Imperial Stock Ranch in Oregon (Imperial Stock Ranch: Imperial Yarn: http://www.imperialstockranch.com/
    Imperial Stock Ranch, Shaniko, OR. Imperial Collection by Anna Cohen) the owners saved a special breed of sheep, and the yarn is supposed to be fantastic. Some of the US Olympic team uniform items are being made from their yarn. It is located north of us, and I intend to get up there next summer. Many of the weavers on the weaving list I am on swear by the quality, but most of the comments on their website are from knitters.


  • Comment by elizabeth — December 24, 2013 @ 9:19 am

    16

    A friend who fences in the senior division told me about this place only yesterday. So I will definitely check them out.


  • Comment by Catmadknitter — December 24, 2013 @ 6:17 pm

    17

    Annabel Smyth

    look up tropical weight wool. Lovely stuff! also I wear fingering weight wool over 2 mm needles all year long (in Arkansas in 100+ heat). They are FAR more comfortable than any other sock dry and wet? No contest.

    Keep in mind desert nomads wear black wool/goat. Lightweight and billowy (makes its own breezes!) is the way to go.

    Elizabeth- the socks sound lovely, springy, and possibly indestructible.


  • Comment by Karen — December 25, 2013 @ 12:53 am

    18

    AThornton,

    I’ve dyed with woad (although not in many of its most toxic configurations — which is one of the reasons I know that it’s not safe to dye “within the city limits,” but it’s the urea that’s required to dye with “real” indigo that always has shocked me smell-wise (even though I was using chemical and not, er, um, “natural sources,” along with the NIMBY aspects that have raised my curiosity beyond, “is Gerdish blue more purple than it is green, and does it have a tendency to ‘crock’ if the water isn’t quite pure to begin with?”

    IOW, my question wasn’t so much about dye-stuffs in Paksworld (as much as they fascinate me just about in the nerdy way that sib engrosses me as a substitute for coffee or tea — as it was about a particular shade of blue: I see indigo as almost a purple blue (see unwashed “denim blue Levi’s” as an example) versus the greener-blue of most formulations of woad as a dyestuff (most of the former of which don’t require anything more toxic than the fermented urea used to produce the “best” shades of indigo” (I hope I don’t need to explain further where the urea came from, lol) that makes the former white within the dyebath. then “oxidizes” to blue upon exposure to air, meaning that dying of “real” indigo is uniquely done in the “rough” of timing as well as every other mystery of chemistry.


  • Comment by Jenn — December 25, 2013 @ 11:38 am

    19

    Blessed Christmas!

    I made it into the city and have cellular!

    Elizabeth, the yarn looks great. At the moment my favourite fiber is mohair. After a month of -25c or lower it is fantastic. I don’t care if it itches. It is thin and warm and doesn’t pill.
    My neighbors are giving me some raw wool from their sheep and I am going to try hand spinning. I am looking forward to it. The dog hair sounds interesting too.


  • Comment by elizabeth — December 25, 2013 @ 12:57 pm

    20

    Jenn: Hurray for escape to the land of better communications. I made a mohair scarf decades ago when I lived in much colder country–and yes, it’s really warm. Where I am now, I don’t think it’s the right fiber for me. Likewise NZ’s possum/wool mix yarns. I had a pair of lightweight possum/wool blend socks I bought in NZ, when we were there in winter, and they were wonderful…until I got back to Texas. WAY too warm. Darn it.

    A friend here in Texas started hand-spinning this year and then got herself a spinning wheel. And she’s recently taken up dyeing with food coloring…really lovely colors she’s getting out of cheap yarn she bought awhile back (on sale, she didn’t like the sort of taupe color, but…you know the lure of cheap yarn.)

    Karen: I see Girdish blue as not as purple as indigo…but indigo is better than a green-blue. Lapis blue maybe. But since the blue in Paksworld always was a special color (even before being forbidden to the “natives” by the magelords) the Girdish actually accept anything close to “true blue” (or its faded versions) as Girdish. They’ve tried to standardize it, but in a world without modern chemical technology, that’s not really happening. Sitting here looking at my Windows XP machine, the blue that Windows uses for the bottom and top “borders–there are two blues, one lighter (but of the same quality) as the other. Both could be considered Girdish, and the scroll buttons, which are lighter yet, are the faded form…except they’re getting close to Verrakai blue. The blue the magelords favored for the kind of embroidery Dorhaniya did–the altar cloth–is a deep, cobalt sort of blue, or like the deepest sapphires have. (Or, I think the deepest sapphires have.) That was a “royal” color back in Aare. There’s a lovely blue used in Mexican colored glass, slightly more purple than cobalt, more like Prussian blue.

    Catmadknitter: The Herdwick socks may be too hot for anything but winter wear–granted they’re Aran-weight and are making a much denser fabric as well as a different gauge on size 5s. The marled yarn (same source) may knit at 7 st/inch on 5s–haven’t started a swatch with it yet–and that’s very close to what I get with the yarns I’ve been using, a good gauge for my socks. But I’d love to have some hard-wearing winter socks for winter, so…all’s good. I think hard-wearing’s going to be the big plus of these (that, and the lanolin in the yarn that eases my thin-skinned fingers as I’m knitting!)


  • Comment by Genko — December 25, 2013 @ 1:10 pm

    21

    Well, the blue we see on computer screens varies from screen to screen as well, so …


  • Comment by Karen — December 25, 2013 @ 9:10 pm

    22

    I almost feel like we should go into spoiler space with such clarity on the shades of blue that distinguish Verrakai blue from Girdish blue (and given that I have a dedicated dyepot that I refuse to let cobalt enter even as a mordant, that’s saying quite a bit).

    So okay, Girdish blue is “true blue” but Verrakai blue is more than a bit lighter and not as “saturated.” IOW, Verrakai blue is “perhaps?” an attempt to mimic the colorspace of a “pure” shade but doesn’t quite fit (I have to admit to an unnatural fascination with color given that my dad is red/green colorblind so that these nuances don’t even remotely register for him but matter immensely to me — especially given the fact that “Mister Lincoln” is his favorite rose, suggesting that there’s more going on with shapes and forms of color than we “think” we know).

    But back on topic (I hope) to say that I dearly wish that I could have spun the hairs of my childhood Irish Setter into gold. My current short-haired white cat produces enough of his undercoat that I’m quite certain that it would make a tremendously warm *anything* except that I’m afraid that the mites that keep it from overwhelming my living space would travel….


  • Comment by Jonathan Schor — December 26, 2013 @ 9:27 am

    23

    The things you learn. I visited the websites on sheep and wool – the modern craftsmanship on both raising sheep and preparing yarn gives hope that industrialization has not indeed won. I enjoy learning the various things available and Ms. Moon’s blog is a very good starting point. The discussions of the color blue and how to achieve it through dying is simply amazing. The different sources of yarn, from dog to nettles. The discussion of the absence of a moon from the world of Paks.

    An adventure novel has become much more than a simple or even a complex story. I thank Ms. Moon for the stretching of the mind.


  • Comment by elizabeth — December 27, 2013 @ 3:59 pm

    24

    For the day to day, I can certainly recommend following @herdyshepherd1 and/or @AmandaOwen8 on Twitter. They both post pictures their sheep, their sheepdogs, their work, and the land. One is in the Lake District and one in Yorkshire.


  • Comment by Heather — December 27, 2013 @ 8:55 pm

    25

    Wensleydale Sheep Shop has some lovely wool – more finished; more what I think Arian’s cloaks must be made of. 🙂 http://yellowbutterflyrecipes.com/


  • Comment by Catmadknitter — December 29, 2013 @ 9:46 am

    26

    I love marled yarn! it adds color without taking away from the knitted patterns.


  • Comment by Elena — December 30, 2013 @ 2:36 am

    27

    You know, I was just about to ask a couple of questions about spinning in the Paksworld, and lo and behold, here is the answer.

    Thanks.

    That, btw, is gorgeous yarn.


  • Comment by Annabel — December 31, 2013 @ 11:50 am

    28

    I did a bit of spinning at one time (life, as Elizabeth so rightly said, is short!), but found it almost impossible to spin the wool if I cleaned it first, so had to spin “in the grease” and then clean it once it had been turned into yarn. I rather envy modern spinners who can buy fibres in wonderful colours to spin, all clean and nice and needing little after-care!


  • Comment by JudithES — December 31, 2013 @ 1:03 pm

    29

    Thank you for the link. I greatly enjoy the diversity of topics you all cover.
    We’ve walked past that farm three times, maybe more. Seen the Angora goats – now, there’s a pr of horns to take note of – and Herdwicks all over the place. A lovely gate on the footpath by the side of the farmhouse…We rarely go anywhere else than the (English) Lake District! Have you come across the walking spinning wheel? It came up in an episode of Tudor Monistary Farm (BBC)and was what the poorer folk had. First time I have come across them. They seem to be a point in progressing to the treddle wheel. In Hartsop (next village over from the farm. Real old) some of the older properties have Spinning Galeries. I wondered why they were so long… but if they held walking wheels the lenth would make sense. Spinning was the job of the older girls and so the term Spinster!


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