Spring is coming…or is it here?
The neighbors are tapping trees along the road to our farm. Most maple syrup producers in our neighborhood have switched to vaccuum lines and reverse-osmosis systems for larger-scale production, but it’s not uncommon to see some folks still using the old ways for small, backyard operations.
It’s the end of March, and I can feel the seasonal shift starting to hit - a moment that arrives every year at about this time, when the winter projects I’d been working on are about to be pushed aside by the urgencies of springtime tasks. It means saying goodbye to a lot of my weaving, spinning, and knitting projects until the cold weather returns in the fall, and a focus on cleaning barns, shearing sheep, starting seeds, and finalizing plans for the gardens and research plots.
That said, there’s the potential for up to a half inch of ice to arrive in the next 24-48 with a late winter storm, so March appears to be going out like a lion this year.
Here’s a look at some of what I’ve been up to, before the view shifts to seeds, gardens, and growing!
I recently taught a warp-weighted loom workshop for Kate Smith at the Weaver’s Croft in Marshfield, Vermont. As always, a diverse group of students made for a great week. One person test-drove his brand-new warp-weighted loom built at the Croft by Ben Leavitt, another used my farm yarn to weave yardage for reconstructing a Viking-era hood, and another wove a varafell using wool locks from her own flock of Friesian X Gotland sheep.
Weaving wool yardage for a Viking age hood.
Weaving a varafell, a wool cloak described in Icelandic texts from the 11th century. In this project, the weaver is using my Romney farm yarn as the warp, and lock of wool from her own flock as the pile/supplemental weft.
I’ve spent more time than I’d like working behind the scenes of this website to coordinate fiber flax seed for sale this spring. As part of my work on the board of the Northern New England Fibershed and a coordinator of our Bast Fiber Community group, it’s become clear that seed sourcing is a real challenge for people wanting to grow flax at any scale, but especially for the smaller plots typically being grown in our region during this time when there is no mechanized harvest machinery or processing capacity available. To try to help address this situation, the NNEF has worked with a variety of suppliers to source fiber flax seed this spring. I am serving as a clearing-house of sorts, and now have quite a bit of seed available for sale here on this website: Avian, Christine, Aramis, and Damara flax are all listed, as is a limited amount of my remaining Linore seed (Linore was developed as a dual-purpose variety in Oregon in the mid-twentieth century. It hasn’t produced good fiber for me, but it may be a good oil seed variety if conditions are right). I’m planning a trip to Pennsylvania and the PA Flax Project as soon as the Damara and Aramis seed clears customs. We’re all crossing our fingers this will happen in the next couple of weeks. To help support the work of our regional fibershed, I am donating 25% of the proceeds of my flax seed sales to the NNEF.
Flax seed.
In a very unexpected turn of events, this winter I started to practice rosemaling, a style of Norwegian folk art painting from the 18th and nineteenth centuries that had a moment of popularity amongst the Norwegian diaspora in the US in the 1970s and 80s.
Why rosemaling? After the election in November, my psyche went searching for comfort, and somehow landed on this style of decorative painting with its graceful scrolls and stylized flowers. I’m presently working from vintage instructional books and YouTube videos (and amassing a small study collection of rosemaled pieces courtesy of Ebay). I’ve signed up for an actual class offered through Vesterheim, the National Norwegian-American Museum in Decorah Iowa later this spring, and I am very much looking forward to spending more time with this craft. Like spinning and weaving, it has a meditative quality to it. More on Vesterheim later! Here are a few examples of what this style of painting looks like.
Shadow checking out a recent painting project in progress; a vintage end table decorated with Norwegian rosemaling.
Blair inspecting a recent painting project; this time, the back of an antique cabinet mounted in the stairwell of my studio.
View from the worktable. The last gasp of winter projects before spring sends me outdoors for the next seven months or so…