September's Fibre Club Letter

September's fibre club letter has arrived and from this the yarn sounds very interesting.

The letter reads:

Alexander von Humboldt was born 250 years ago on September 14th. He was an incredible man, who travelled the world as a naturalist. He made a huge number of discoveries, a quick glance at the disambiguation page on Wikipedia reveals an astounding number of things that are named after him, more species use his name than any other scientist. Probably most notable of all was that he was the first scientist to raise the issue of climate change. As far back as 1800 he warned that humans were destroying our environment. Charles Darwin wrote that without Humboldt he would never have set foot on the Beagle. 

He was the son of Prussian aristocrats, he was able to self-finance trips to the Americas, and became one of the first scientists to decide and explore the continents. Over his lifetime he travelled 24,000 miles, including the entire length of the Orinoco River in Venezuela (1700 miles). It’s really hard to describe just how many things he discovered, how much data he collected, and how many theories he developed and proved. He was the first to recognise that Africa and South America would have once been a single land mass, long before the discovery of tectonic plates and the theory of continental drift. 

If you’ve looked at a weather forecast recently, then you will have seen the work of Humboldt. He was the first to collect temperatures at different geographical locations, and then draw lines connecting places of the same temperature, creating what’s known as an isobar. The modern maps we see with pretty coloured blobs showing how temperature fluctuates are the direct descendant of his way of presenting data. 

In addition to being a scientist Humboldt was also a humanist. He argued that all the people of the world were a single species, and that no culture had any “god-given” right to dominance over the rest, or any sort of biological advantage. He opposed slavery, imperialism and colonialism. Dyeing his lifetime slavery came to dominate the economy of the Americas, and empire building was at its peak. It’s hard to over state just how much his publicly stated opinions and beliefs set him apart from so many other public figures of the time. 

For your colour inspiration this month I’ve taken inspiration from one of the species named after Humboldt, Spheniscus humboldti, otherwise known as the Humboldt penguin. This species lived on islands off the coast of Chile, right in the path of the Humboldt current, the Pacific ocean current that brings cold water to the South American coast, which was also discovered by Humboldt.

So I can expect something penguin coloured, most likely black and white with maybe a few other bits of colour like yellow or blue.  I'm trying to remember exactly what a Humboldt penguin looks like, I may be getting the yellow and blue idea from another species of penguin, I'll have to have a look online.

From the spoilers chat she has revealed that it is a tweed blend with little bumps and it will be impossible to spin this perfectly smooth. She also says it contains Llama and South American wool, which are smooth with a long staple.  I can't wait to see this one!

The Harvest, 2019

With the back garden renovations that have taken place this year and us going away on holiday I was a little late this year in planting up the raised vegetable bed.  Following some problems in previous years with the carrots I decided to try growing them from seed rather than seedlings and so I decided to do this with all of the vegetables. 

I bought carrot seeds, beetroot seeds and runner bean seeds.  I didn't plant up until the first week of June and following the instructions on the packets I planted carrots and beetroot outdoors and within 24 hours of planting the seeds we had nothing but rain for a couple of weeks, a lot heavy rain.  The runner beans had to be sowed indoors and they were growing quickly.  I transported them outdoors and planted them in their growing place.

Some of the carrots started to sprout, but not many and the beetroot were a total no show.  I left it a few weeks but still nothing so I planted more seeds, thinking that maybe the first lot had been washed away with the sheer amount of rain we had had.  I kept looking in hope and eventually we had a few little leaves appear in a few places and out of about 300 seeds planted I counted about 40 tiny seedlings.  They were doing OK for about a week and then all of a sudden they just disappeared and not a single beetroot was grown and harvested this year.  I love fresh beetroot and I was devastated, given the glut of beetroot harvest we've had the past two years.

We didn't fair too well with the carrots either this year, I had to plant additional carrot seeds where there were large gaps where they just didn't germinate but we've not exactly had brilliant weather this year, its been quite wet, or at least that's what it seems to have been.  One thing we did do with the carrots this year though, and that was to get nice straight carrots!  I did make more carrot top dye again this year and I used it to dye some Jacobs fleece.

As for the beans, they went totally mad and I was harvesting huge amounts of beans every couple of days.  I'm not kidding, take a look at the photos, that is the same pile of beans from two different angles and that was the biggest single harvest but every couple of days I was harvesting half to thirds of that amount each time.  The freezer was full of bags of sliced, blanched runner beans.

Spinning up Tante Violett

This is another spinning fibre that I brought from The Fluffy Viking seven years ago and this also spun like a dream with no issues.  This one is also 60% Merino, 20% Polwarth, 20% Bleached Tussah Silk.

Its gorgeous, spun from the end and made a 2ply yarn that is sport weight and 103g/353m

Trying more plant based dyes

After harvesting the homegrown carrots, I have once again made some dye using the carrot tops but this time I am not waiting to use it at a later date, I am using it straight away.  I am also going to try a couple of dried goods for dyeing that I bought from a supplier, marigolds and logwood.

I mordanted the entirety of the white parts of a Jacob fleece in Bichromate of Potash first.  Its not a safe chemical and certainly not eco-friendly, which is a shame as by using plant material for dyes you would think that the whole process would be more eco-friendly than other dyes, but sadly not.  For plant dyes to take effectively you need to mordant the fibre and it is the various mordants that are not eco-friendly.

The fleece came from a friend of an ex-work colleague, you can read about that here.  This one was fleece No.5.

The first thing I dyed with was the carrot top dye that I had just made.  The tops had been chopped and soaked for 3 days, boiled up and simmered for about an hour.  I strained the greenery from the dye, which went into our compost bin, and put the dye liquid back into the dye pot and added 160g of mordanted fleece into it.  I don't think this is as vibrant as last time I used carrot top dyes but I am using a different fibre as well as maybe different strength of plant material relative to the amount of water.  I don't know, its often guesswork with me.

The next thing to go in the dye pot was some dried logwood which had been soaked in a little container of water for 12 hours.  This then had to be simmered for about an hour to obtain the dye.  Logwood produces dark grey dye but interestingly the water turned red when it was simmering.  I had read that if you add about a tablespoon of powdered chalk to the prepared logwood dye before you add the fibre then this produces blue fibres, rather than dark grey.  I gave this a go and put 247g of mordanted fleece into the dye pot.

I'm happy with the results of this one, I have a wonderful mix of dark blue and blue-grey fibres, this will be interesting once its combed.

Logwood can also be used on non-mordanted fibres and it is supposed to take.  The dye bath was clearly not exhausted so I ran and fetched some mohair fleece that I had had sitting around for some time.  I didn't dye all of the mohair but I did grab and good amount, 184g actually, and dumped it into the dye pot.  It didn't seem to be taking any of the dye at all until I added a good glug of citric acid to the dye pot, where it suddenly turned a mushroom kind of colour.  Not the best but not really nasty, I can use this, but I was hoping for some kind of blue-grey like the Jacob wool produced.

The final batch of dye was made using dried marigold flowers, which I followed the instructions for and soaked them for about an hour before simmering them for an hour.  I put 64g of mordanted fleece into the dye pot and hoped that it turned out the colour I had read about and that I hoped for.  No such luck.  Its quite boring to be honest and certainly does not have any orange colouration to it that my natural dye book said it produces with this mordant, as different mordants can affect the final colour produced and this is why I chose to mordant with Bichromate of Potash.

Family Day out to Charlcote Park, Warwickshire

Yesterday we went out as a family to National Trust property Charlcote Park.  Its not that far from where we live, about a 40 minute drive, depending on traffic.  I am the only one in the family that has ever been here before but that was about 34 years ago so to come back and visit this place as an adult was very interesting.

It has been home to the Lucy family since the time of King Richard I in the 1100's and the current Baronet, Sir Edmund Fairfax-Lucy who is a painter and artist, still lives in the private upper rooms to this day.  You can read more about the family history here.

When you arrive, you park across the road in the car park, pay or show your membership and then go across the road, through the gate and walk along a really long path to the outer building/gatehouse.  Once you are through the gatehouse it opens up into a lawned area with a few statues and a small area with small fruit trees growing and the main house in front of you.

Left: The Gatehouse.  Top: The Main House.  Bottom Centre: Rear view of the Main House. Bottom Right: Cottage next to rear entrance gates of the property.

That beautifully ornate "cottage" sits right next to a set of massive gates, obviously the rear entrance to the property and maybe would have been some kind of Gatehouse in the past, maybe home to the head groundsman many years ago, maybe it still is, but someone would have had to have been close by to open and close those huge gate.  The gates lead directly onto a long tree-lined path which you can see the end of in the bottom middle photo as it goes over a bridge and although it looks like it takes you right up to the rear of the building it doesn't, it actually takes you off to the right and you end up at the outbuildings which house all of the old coaches and carriages and years ago would have housed horses too.  As you walk from those gates along that path you can imagine coach and horses travelling along.  If you look at the first aerial view further down you can see the path coming in from the bottom and into the stable and outbuilding area.

The park is home to a herd of Fallow Deer and you can see these as you walk from the entrance gate to the Gate House.  There are a lot of them, more than you can see in my photos.  I stopped and changed lens's for my "big lens" though as they were still quite a distance away and I didn't want to get too near to them.  My "big lens" is really good for zooming in on objects far away, as you can tell, but not for anything close up so I had to change back to my normal lens after I took these shots.  I was amazed by the different colours in the herd.

Once through the Gatehouse, you enter a large court yard area with nice lawns on either side of the path and a couple of statues either side of a set of steps that lead up to another area that is open to the public but you can't go up the steps as there is a locked gate at the top of the steps with a fancy stone wall on either side, and I couldn't resist getting an "arty" photo of one of the statues through that wall later when we were the other side of that locked gate.  Maybe the steps are too dangerous to have people constantly going up and down them.

Inside the house, in the main hall, there are these beautiful stained glass windows and the guide told us that they represent the history of the house and the Lucy family.

There is also a lot of beautiful furniture and I was especially drawn to the detailing of the inlay on these chairs and cabinet.  Absolutely stunning and, for me, totally mesmerising. 

Round the back of the house is a beautiful formal Capability Brown garden with steps down to the River Avon, where in times gone by visitors to the house could arrive by boat, if they lived on neighbouring properties or just along the river, or the family could just go for a boat ride along the river on a nice summers day.

There really isn't a good focal point in which to get a great shot of the garden but thanks to the power of Google, I can show you an aerial shot.

And finally, a photo from a history display in the main gatehouse, which I found really interesting and then a couple of photos from our walk around the vast expanse of the outer areas of the estate.  The Jacob Sheep, how could I not go and see them and how could I not include them after the amount of yarn that I spun from the fleece of Jacobs sheep.  I can't add all the links to all of the posts I've written about the yarn I've made from Jacobs fleece, if I did this post would be twice as long as it is and I think its already as long as War and Peace as it is!

If ever you are in the Warwickshire area and fancy an historical and educational day out, you certainly can't go wrong with paying a visit to Charlecote Park.  For exact location for a SatNav its CV35 9ER and if you need details of opening times, prices, what's on and special days then just go back to the top of this post and click on the Charlcote Park link, which will take you to the National Trust website for this place.

August's Fibre has arrived - Peterloo

When the letter came a few days ago I didn't know what to expect other than blue and white.  Its quite nice, almost like a denim look to it and if you look really close it almost like there is a pink tinge to some of it.  Its 50% Shetland Wool, 25% New Zealand Wool, 25% Linen so its not the softest wool but she did say that it would be quite stiff until its worked.

August's Fibre Club Letter

August's fibre club letter has arrived. Its quite a long letter again this time.  Interesting though!

The letter reads:

Two hundred years ago, on Monday 16th August a massacre occurred at St Peter’s Field Manchester. It was a notable event because it was the start of the process of the British working classes gaining the vote, and also due to the horrifying number of deaths and injuries. 

A crowd of 60,000-80,000 had gathered from many areas surrounding Manchester. They gathered to protest about the lack of representation for the new city of Manchester, which had a booming population due to the Industrial Revolution and the rising number of cotton mills. The whole of Lancashire was represented by just 2 members of Parliament, and only men who owned land with a rental income of 40 Shillings a year could cast their vote, in person, in Lancaster. One million people were represented by just 4 people in the area of Manchester. 

At the time there were 515 MPs for England and Wales, of these, 351 were returned by the patronage of 177 individual voters and a further 16 by the direct patronage of the government: all 45 Scottish MPs owed their seats to patronage. Added to this discontent about political representation, was an economic recession which came about at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Textile workers were earning 3 times less in 1818 as they were in 1803. The Corn Laws led to a shortage of food in the country, causing rising prices, leading to famine. 

Members of the Manchester Patriotic Union, a group of radicals from the Manchester Observer newspaper organised a “great assembly” in the month of August. The founder of the newspaper, Joseph Johnson wrote to the famous political orator Henry Hunt inviting him to address a political rally. The letter included this line- “Nothing but ruin and starvation stare one in the face [in the streets of Manchester and the surrounding towns], the state of this district is truly dreadful, and I believe nothing but the greatest exertions can prevent an insurrection. Oh, that you in London were prepared for “ However, their communications were being read by government spies, and the 15th Hussars army cavalry regiment were sent to Manchester in preparation for the rally. 

Johnson and Hunt were determined that the rally would not fall victim to the popular opinions against giving the working poor a political vote. Namely that they were ragged, dirty and rowdy. The groups that marched in to St Peter’s field had been told to dress in their Sunday best, and many had drilled and rehearsed before the gathering. Peterloo was unusual due to the number of female protestors, many of who wore white to show their purity. 

When all the protestors had assembled they were in an area roughly as large as 45 tennis courts, with narrow access points, many of which were blocked by the cavalry soldiers. The local magistrates issued a warrant for the arrest of Henry Hunt, Joseph Johnson, and other organisers. Due to the crowds it was decided that the military would need to be present to allow the arrest to be carried out. The cavalry officers were sent charging though the packed crowds, on horseback, with drawn swords and caused a general panic. The main exit route was also blocked by the 88th Regiment of Foot, who had formed up with drawn bayonets. 

It became a massacre. With inexperienced soldiers (who were possibly drunk) panicking, and frightened crowds unable to escape. The number of deaths and injuries, has never been established with certainty, but it’s suggested that 11–15 were killed and 400–700 injured. The women in the crowd were significantly more likely to be injured. Only 12% of the crowd were female, but 168 of the 654 officially recorded casualties were women. 

The general public were horrified by the massacre, and many commemorative items went on sale, with the proceeds going to the victims. Press coverage of the event was unusually thorough, many journalists from further afield than Manchester had been present, and reports were in many national newspapers. Many of the organisers were jailed, and the commanding officers were acquitted of all charges as the gathering was judged to have been illegal. The immediate response of the government was to introduce legislation reducing civil liberties, the Manchester Observer was shut down, and by the end of 1820 every significant working-class radical reformer was in jail. 

In 1832 the Great Reform Act created the Manchester parliamentary borough, and the area elected its first two MPs. One of the candidates was the great reform campaigner William Cobbett. The name Peterloo stemmed from the battle of Waterloo, which had happened just 4 years earlier. 

Until now the only commemoration of the massacre was a small blue plaque on a building in the city near to the site of St Peter’s field. Earlier this month a new memorial was unveiled. The design is beautiful, but inaccessible by anyone who has mobility issues. It is ironic that a memorial to a campaign for democracy and inclusion should suffer from limited democratic participation and leave some people feeling excluded. 

For my colour inspiration today I’ve used a popular image from the time, that would have been seen by many as they read about Peterloo. It features the blue jacketed cavalry officers charging through the crowds, cutting down the women dressed in white.

Ok, so I can expect something blue and white then, hmmmmm.

From the spoilers chat it sounds like this one might be a little bit more coarse, it is a linen blend best spun from the end worsted spun and maybe on the finer side of things as opposed to thicker spun and that the washed yarn may feel a little stiff but should soften when working with it.