Custom Blend - Ice Caves

Day 169: I've had several bags of Corriedale top sitting in the spinning cupboard for some time now, not really wanting to spin it up plain and trying to figure out a way I could spice it up a bit. In the interim, I've been spinning a Merino/bamboo blend which is rapidly becoming my favourite fiber. As luck would have it, my primary fiber supplier recently put a 100% bamboo top on sale. It was only available in one colour ("Glimmerglass," a mix of blues with a tiny touch of lavender), but it was perfect for my purpose. I blended a bit with the Corriedale using my hand carders and spun up a sample using a tahkli spindle. Although I was pleased with the result shown here, I've decided to add a little more of the bamboo, bringing the content up to approximately 70% Corriedale/30% bamboo. That should be a good combination for long-wearing socks. That said, I've become a little spoiled working with Merino. The Corriedale fiber seems much coarser than I remembered. I've dubbed this shimmery blend "Ice Caves" because it reminds me of the blue light inside the old ice caves above Paradise (Mount Rainier National Park) which now no longer exist.

Bobbin Along

Day 168: Just call me Red, Red Robin 'cuz I'm bob-bob-bobbin along! This week's spinning projects included finishing up a second bobbin (4 ounces) of a Merino wool/bamboo blend and allowing it to rest for a few days alongside a fully loaded companion. A short nap improves its disposition when it's time to ply. Most spinners prefer to let the fibers relax into the twist imparted in spinning for a day or two before plying. Call it "fiber yoga," if you will, for after having bent into contortions, the fiber now needs to maintain its pose to achieve the greatest benefit. In the meantime, I broke out a manual tahkli and a free sample which came with an order of wool top, a luscious moss green blend of Merino and alpaca. The freebie yielded a whole 16 meters of double-ply lace weight yarn, just enough to add a few rows to the top edge of sock cuffs. That said, it's not a fiber I would care to spin on a regular basis, the alpaca having a tendency toward fuzziness like Angora. I sneezed a lot during that spinning session, despite the fact that alpaca fiber is hypoallergenic. With a few days under its belt, the wool/bamboo blend is ready to be plied now, but must wait in line until I am finished with another colourway of the same product currently on the wheel.

Filbert In Flower

Day 167: A few days ago, the Nisqually Land Trust posted a photo in social media of a flower which they described as one of their favourites and posed the question, "Do you know what it is?" I leapt on the chance to be first to identify it by responding, "Beaked Filbert (Corylus cornuta)!" But that set me to wondering why I had never featured the female flowers on my Contorted Filbert, aka Harry Lauder's Walking Stick in my blog. Well, folks, here you have it as a Penny Perspective! It's hard to imagine that teeny-tiny little flower giving rise to a hazelnut at maturity, but that's the way it goes...providing, of course, that the birds don't eat the sweet flower buds first. Juncos in particular are fond of them (they like blueberry buds, too), so my tree has produced very few nuts over thirty years, and those were either carried away by squirrels or holed and devoured by worms. I have never found one with a nut inside. In case you were wondering, the long, dangling catkins are the male flowers. They produce the pollen which fertilizes the female flower. Filberts are wind-pollinated, so given the gusty conditions we've had for the last few days, my chances of finding a hazelnut or two this fall might be pretty good.

At The End Of The Trail

Day 166: Yesterday was a beautiful day for a hike, albeit rather chilly in the shaded woods on the north side of a ridge. For the first half mile or so, I was wishing I'd grabbed my mittens, but switching my trekking pole from one hand to the other occasionally while keeping the free hand in a pocket solved the problem. I hadn't really intended to walk the entire South Swofford Trail, but as usual, once I start, I find it hard to quit. The stillness and solitude of this little "nature walk" is unlike any other I've found locally, owing in part to the regulation which prohibits combustion motors on the reservoir pond. Small farms and homes dot the north shore sparsely, and only the occasional dog's bark or voice carries across the water. It is a good place to listen to waterfowl gabbling, to woodpeckers drilling, to Pacific Wren singing his complex, lilting aria or even to hear the splash of a trout's rise for an insect on the surface of the lake. The end of the trail is reached in 1.25 miles when it debouches into a grassland which remains deceptively boggy until the driest part of the year. A step or two beyond this point in the current season would overtop a boot with water, preventing access to a patch of Skunk Cabbage at the west edge. I found no early wildflowers blooming in the woods; no Cardamine or Oxalis buds, only small leaves, but I had come for Skunk Cabbage and quietness, and found both in plenty.

First Day Of Skunk Cabbage, Officially

Day 165: I do hereby officially declare today as the First Day of Skunk Cabbage. I say "officially" because I spotted a single spathe during my hike a week ago, but couldn't get close enough to take a photo. This image comes from my favourite bog on the South Swofford Trail, and I am happy to say that it was much boggier than it's been in several years, so much so that even if I had had my muck boots with me, I would not have ventured any closer for fear of being permanently mired. That said, the official First Day of Skunk Cabbage is a bit late this year, not only for me, but for Lysichiton americanus as well. The flowers are still young and small, and the leaves are barely beginning to show. After visiting the bog, I continued on the trail to its western end, a delightful if somewhat chilly walk in complete solitude with very few sounds penetrating the stillness. That in itself is worth celebrating.

Colaptes Auratus

Day 164: Male and female Northern Flickers are easy to tell apart. The males have "moustaches," i.e. a coloured patch on the cheek. However, where the Yellow-shafted and Red-shafted races intergrade, this marking may be either red or black. In 2019, I observed an intergrade in my yard. My attention was drawn by the distinctly yellow colour under the tail and the red spot on the nape of the neck, but the bird's malar patch was red rather than black which is typical of Yellow-shafted. Now, I again have an intergrade at the suet feeder. I doubt that it is the same bird since this one is obviously of breeding age (there is a courtship going on), and the life expectancy of Northern Flickers is seldom longer than 6-7 years for either race. The evidence that the male is an intergrade escaped my notice until I enlarged the image and saw the tiny red patch on the nape, a telltale which is not present in the Red-shafted type. Genetics in action! Right here in my own back yard!

Handcuffed To The Wheel

Day 163: And there I was, handcuffed to the wheel for the duration. No, I hadn't been arrested. I'd made a plying bracelet from the last of the singles on one bobbin and was finishing up eight ounces of a lovely Merino-bamboo blend, but I was going to be there a while as the yarn uncoiled itself from my wrist. Had I taken it off my hand...to answer the call of nature, say, or because someone showed up on my doorstep...I might never have been able to untangle it.

A few posts back, I mentioned a plying bracelet, referring to it as "a rat's nest," which isn't truly accurate. It's actually a means by which the thread can be drawn off from both ends simultaneously so that it can be plied with itself. The method for winding it onto the fingers seems complex at first, but once you've mastered it, the action is not difficult to maintain. Assuming the right hand will be the hand nearest the body when spinning, the singles is passed around the back of the hand (for this example, the left edge of the hand as the palm is facing you), brought to the front and counter-clockwise around the middle finger, taken to the back of the hand again following the same path, then brought around the opposite (right) side of the hand, clockwise around the middle finger, and then to the back of the hand again following the path it just travelled. The motion is repeated until all the singles has been wound onto the hand. Then the loops around the middle finger are carefully removed from it, and the bracelet is slid onto the wrist. The end is joined to the end of the singles on the bobbin which was emptied first, and plying can be continued normally. The singles in the plying bracelet feeds from both its outer and inner wraps, and only occasionally does the spinner need to dip between the two strands to keep it from tangling. This technique is sometimes referred to as "Andean plying," but its true origins are unclear and the subject of contention among spinners. In any event, the method was developed in the dim, dark days of drop spindles, long before the "modern" spinning wheel was invented. You have to admire the ingenuity!

It took the better part of two days to ply up eight ounces of Paradise Fibers Bambino plus 60 yards of cotton I'd spun on the charkha. With another bobbin already full of a different Bambino colourway, I desperately needed to free up a bobbin in order to continue. Now I'm back to spinning singles, but another Plyday is coming soon, and I'll undoubtedly have an hour or so when I'm once again handcuffed to the wheel.