Mum's WIP and two finished pieces

After Mum recovered from all the spinning, she went back to her work in progress. More crochet, but using all the odds and ends of wool she could find.



And here are two pieces that she finished in the meantime. We just have to cut off the superfluous threads for her. I tell her to slow down, but she just smiles and says that I'll need it all for her book.

Spinning again!

Mum's spinning again and it's going fine. She's using the handmade Swiss spinning wheel that she's had for ages. The jacket she's wearing is made from her own hand-spun wool which she hand-dyed using local plants.

She's also been asked to share some pix of her work using recycled plastic bags in the Trashion Nation group at Flickr. She's on a roll.

Vats of fleece

My daughter was asking me about how things were when I was young. We had to make do with what we had back then. My father had a farm in Gorenzen with a few cows, pigs, a couple of work horses and 34 sheep. The sheep were kept in sheds all winter and by the time spring came, their fleeces were filthy. Ammonia was too expensive to use as a cleaning agent, so the whole of the family was encouraged to go on the potty. All the urine was collected and boiled in a big vat and that's where the fleeces were cleaned. Then they were rinsed in water and set out in the sun to dry. Then the wool was carded and spun.

In the 80s in Sydney when I started wool dying, I used ammonia as a fixative for the colours. Here's a photo of a vat of fleece from then. The lovely colour though came from using leaves from the silver-dollar gum, and I didn't need to use ammonia since eucalypts have tannin which fixes the colours naturally.

Here's a picture of what some of the dyed wool looked like once spun and knitted.