Last night I had a dream about my grandmother, not a regular dream but a visiting dream.  You know those kind?

We used to take rides together in the car when I was growing up.  She would tell me about important life stuff that required having a teenager strapped down for awhile, unable to find a distraction outside of the mountain range ahead or twinkling Christmas lights around town.  She reserved these rides for advice like, “Don’t even think about getting married until you’re 25,” and “You’re a butterfly girl.  Pursuing any career that isn’t creative will suffocate you.”

She was a smart lady.

Sometimes I wonder what she would be like now, walking toward her last steps in life if Crohn’s hadn’t ended her journey so prematurely.  I was tickled when she showed up in a mini van, complete with handicapped tag in the window, and translucent white hair.  She pays closer attention than I think.  We went for a drive.

Up the hills.  Overlooking valleys.  To places that I hadn’t seen in a long, long time.  Places that transform with time, shifting in size and magnitude.

“Wow, that valley used to look so much deeper.  It’s really not that big of a drop, is it?”

“I remember when I couldn’t even get all the way up that hill.”

She drove, mostly quiet but giving thousands of words in wisdom through the familiar skylines that we looked at together time and time again.  We sat at the base of a mountain, one I hadn’t seen before, and we were silent.  There was a large playing field at the peak, a professional football stadium.  In the gate stood a man.  She started up the road, quickly.

“Gram, you’re going really fast.  You might hit that guy.”

“Jewel, you gotta keep your momentum high because the hardest part is just before the top.  Don’t stop, don’t slow down.  Or you’ll have to go all the way back to the bottom and start over. He’ll just have to move.”

*blink*blink*

Last week, I experienced a pretty good setback.  And by pretty good, I mean both substantial and positive.  Though I had checked, double checked, and triple checked with lots of official and important sounding people, I was given the incorrect direction in terms of health department requirements and tiny empires of tea.  It seems tea is a gray area and there are particular packaging/repackaging rules that require a hefty amount of paperwork and licensing.  These requirements are now taking up plenty of space on my to-do list.

And that means no more tea until I get it sorted out.

While I’m happy that I finally have a definitive answer and I will eventually be able to offer and produce my tea blends on a grander scale, it kind of sucks that I didn’t have this information three months ago.  You know, before the peak of tourist season.

Sigh.

Thankfully, I’ve been on a little knitting bender.…

And I like to flitter from flower to flower.

It’s kind of my thing.

Patient Papa, strong and flexible as always, took the helm of the household while I stared at the spin, spin, spin of the wheel and watched fiber fly from my fingertips.

It started innocently with a quick upcycled project using a fuzzy acrylic and some leftover chocolate brown handspun singles…

and moved into another upcycled experiement (left)…and some handspun wool (right)…

and that was so fun that I tackled a couple more colorways in wool…

and then I tackled some hemp fiber…

You might notice that enormous mountain of unfolded laundry behind the wheel there.  And you might even see the sweet little shirt with the spinning wheel on it that my pal Heidi made for Annabelle.

Yep, that’s right Annabelle.  Some days your mama is a spinnin’ machine.  Special thanks to the papa and the kiddos for cutting me some slack while I immersed myself in the practice of working meditation.  It was sorely needed.

We like the environment.

I would wager to say that almost every action we take is coupled with the thoughts, “How will this contribute to our ecological footprint?  What are the lasting repercussions?”  Our family re-uses whatever we can, we make the choice to get “new-to-us” items rather than buying something brand new, and we prefer to walk or ride bikes just about everywhere (still trying to figure out how we’re going to load up the bike trailers with all the gear we need to go camping with two babies…)

Sometimes we trap ourselves in a little box of eco-perfection, when we feel like we can’t do anything without disrupting the flow of the entire natural world.

Sigh.

When I process wool, it comes to me in raw form.  That means that someone gave a sheep a haircut, put all the wool in a bag, and then delivered what some would consider a greasy, stinky, filthy parcel to my open, outstretched arms.  Personally, I think raw fleece is lovely–rich with lanolin and touches of mother nature (aka:  hay)–but I understand that most folks prefer a tamer version of this beautiful fiber.  That’s cool with me.

So I wash the wool in a special way, pick through it to remove all of the bits of mother nature (hay), comb it to remove the weakened sun-damaged fibers (it is hair after all), and then card it into little blobs called rolags in order to make it easy to spin.  Someday I will show you pictures of this process, but I think I was talking about the environment today.  I get a little sidetracked when I start thinking about wool.  Sorry.

After the combing, there are a few mounds of hay-ey, crappy little bits left over.  I could spin these up to weave into rugs, but I like to leave them outside for birdies to snatch up as nesting material.  Because I’m nice and I figure birds like to be warm too.

Enter the eco-terrorist that lives inside my mind:

“What kind of effect will this have on the populations of birds?”

“What if a particular species gathers the wool, stays warmer than it should, refuses to fly south for the winter, and then dies because of this wool?”

I’m serious.  This is the kind of crap that I think about.

So the other day I was taking the kiddos around for a stroll and happened upon a fallen branch, a casualty of the windstorm from the previous evening.  And I found this:

You might notice that big hunk of plastic in the front of the nest there.  And the bits of wool that I threw out into the yard earlier this summer.  I think I’ll take my chances with providing the sweet birdies with wool.

I’ve been pretty busy these last few months, what with the new baby and the summer market, and my general state of constant craftiness.  but I miss my blog.  I have a feeling that I’ll take a big break from it next summer too, but for now I am happy to return to this place.

even if it looks a little crappy right now.  perfection = laziness, so if you’re going to love me you have to put up with a few warts.  for awhile anyway.

so here’s what I’ve been learning to do since the last time we hung out:

“grey hackle peacock” ~ upcycled handspun yarn

and not only is it handspun yarn, I use reclaimed-recycled-upcycled-whatever-you-want-to-call-them fibers.  I just say I use ugly yarn and make it look real pretty.

spinning wool has presented yet another opportunity for me to examine the small things in life–those elements that are beyond my control, the joy of learning, the frustration of…oh, so many things.  a microcosm of the universe so to speak (was it Joseph Conrad that said that?  can’t remember now.)  anyway, these are thoughts that I’ve been collecting, delicately placing in a basket to share.  my harvest of wool and acrylic and hideous polyester novelty yarns.

and you should see the looks I get from the die-hard spinners in our spinners group when I pull out a skein of this flashy, plastic-y, horrible yarn and begin adding perfectly good wool to the mix.  heheh.

there will be much more to come, but for now I have to go retrieve all of the shoes that my toddler just threw out the front window.