Although the idea that we’re using valuable resources to make new plastic fiber still strikes me as wrong, there might be a place for synthetic clothing made from recycled plastic. I could live with this, and some companies are doing this. However, 70 percent of America’s plastic water bottles still aren’t recycled (I should probably take a wee bit of responsibility for this), so we have lots of room for improvement. And if we can create plastic clothes out of oil, can’t we figure out how to replace these fabrics by expanding the list of uses for wool? Lightweight shirts, lightweight jackets, polo shirts, vests, sweatshirts—they could all be made of wool. If we can put humans on the moon and land little rovers on Mars and photograph the rings of Saturn, you’d think we could come up with more environmentally friendly clothing.
Polartec is finally catching on to the wonders of wool. According to a Sheep Industry News article, the company is creating a product that is 44 percent wool, and the wool is 100 percent American raised. Said a representative of Polartec, “We just really like the U.S. wool story.”
And what about comfortable wool undies? Why don’t we give them a try? I finally mention this to Melissa, who looks at her crazy wife and says, “You first.”
I think it’s such a great idea. Do we really need oil-based synthetic underwear? Or cotton underwear? The earth “created” oil millions of years ago, but oil is not renewable. When it’s gone, it’s gone. Cotton is a renewable resource, but current production methods harm the planet. Yet with a little help from sheep, we could make wool underwear forever, and without high chemical or pesticide use.
I know the world isn’t so black and white that it comes down to people choosing among cotton, plastic, and wool. We’ll all likely continue wearing cotton and plastic, but if we can replace those fabrics with wool, it seems the planet-friendly thing to do.
I’m finding wool so inspiring that it occurs to me: Perhaps I should give those compact fluorescent light bulbs another try.
And Photogenic, to Boot
Kathryn Dun’s Beautiful Sheep: Portraits of Champion Breeds provides the sheep “addicts” of the world with more than a hundred daz- zling pages of wooly heroin.
—WILD FIBER MAGAZINE
Giving yet another farm tour, I stand at the edge of the winter feeding area, called the Sacrifice Lot because we sacrifice the grass there. Visitors watch the sheep, and I’m proud of how plump and content the sheep look. They lift their heads and watch us. Sheep can recognize up to 100 human faces, and because they’ve never seen the people with me, they keep their distance.
The woman and her husband are there to pick up their order of lamb. She tips her head and asks, “What breed are your sheep?” She asks this as if confident she’ll recognize it. In another fit of crankiness, I’m tempted to answer, “Jabberwocky sheep,” or “Sparkle-Farkle sheep.”
Instead, I take a deep breath and rattle off our five-way mix of breeds: “Corriedale, Columbia, Targhee, Dorset, and Finn, with a little bit of Texel and Shropshire thrown in.”
“Oh,” is her answer. That is always the answer.
Most people recognize many dog breeds, some cat breeds, and a few nonfarmers can tell a Holstein from a Scottish Highland, but who knows what a Blue-faced Leicester looks like? Or a Babydoll Southdown? Or a Zwartbles, or a Balwen Welsh Mountain? There are more breeds of sheep than of any other domestic livestock mammal. I don’t know what this says about shepherds—that we like to tinker with genetics? That we’re always in search of the perfect sheep?
Maybe we are. Which sheep produces the best meat? The best wool? Merino sheep were the gold standard of sheep in the Middle Ages, thanks to fine wool that could be spun and woven into a soft, supple fabric. Merinos are so wrinkly they look like huge Shar Pei dogs with a seven-inch-long fleece. If you joined the fiber of five Merino sheep end to end, you could wrap a thread of wool around the world.
The Merino was developed mostly in Spain, thanks to the sheep brought by the Moors when they controlled the Iberian Peninsula for nearly 700 years. By the 1550s, Merino sheep were so valuable and desired that the Spanish kings refused to sell or trade them. Smuggling a Merino out of Spain was punishable by death, and breeding secrets were national treasures.
The ideas of “Merino” and “Spain” became so closely woven that soon no one was able to see them clearly. Spaniards became convinced that the Merino sheep could only survive in Spain, that once moved from the pastures of the Iberian Peninsula, away from the tender loving care of Spanish shepherds, the sad, wrinkly sheep would die.
This gave King Philip V an idea. Why not use Merinos to pay off foreign debts or to pay required dowries to other countries? The king would get rid of his debts, but the sheep would die, leaving the recipient nothing but the realization he’d been duped. So King Philip did just that, sending the valuable Merino out into the world.
Funny thing happened. The sheep didn’t die. They thrived on French pasture. They did just fine being cared for by German or Russian shepherds, and as sheep are wont to do, those lusty Merinos began reproducing. No longer was the Merino solely found in Spain.
In 1797, the Merinos reached Australia when a Dutch commandant committed suicide in Cape Town, South Africa, leaving behind a ship stocked with valuables, including thirteen of the world’s finest merino sheep. His widow, not knowing their value, sold them to a ship captain who brought them to Australia, intending to sell them to the prisons for meat. Fortunately, a clever captain, John Macarthur, recognized the sheep for what they were, bought them at a ridiculously low price, and started the industry that became Australia’s largest export.
In 1808, President Thomas Jefferson wrote Washington Irving, the American ambassador to Spain, hoping to snag a few Merinos because “we desire to emancipate ourselves from dependence on foreign wool.” Irving came through and two years later 4,000 Merinos crossed the ocean. A handful of them ended up on Thomas Jefferson’s farm. By 1810, Merino Mania was in full swing as breeders throughout the world raced to import or steal as many Merinos as possible.
The Merinos were quite expensive, not only because they’d been transported across the ocean from Europe, but because they were scarce, so the prices of these lovely animals shot through the roof. They often sold for over $1,000 apiece, which back then was a fortune. Even today, few small shepherds will pay $1,000 for a ram.
Mr. William Foster of Boston smuggled three sheep from Spain into America in 1793, and left them with a close friend of his, Andrew Craigie of Cambridge. William was going to breed these sheep and make a fortune on the fine wool he’d produce, as well as selling the offspring as breeding stock.
I can’t resist imagining possible conversations William and Andrew might have had. One version could have been: “Andrew, here are three sheep from Spain. They’re worth about $1,000 apiece. Could you take good care of them? They’re Merino sheep which I will use to entirely transform the wool and textile industry in America. I’ll be back for them. Thanks, buddy.”
Or did the conversation go something like this: “Andrew, here are three sheep. Thanks, buddy.” Or was there no conversation at all, but instead, did William ship them to Andrew without saying a word, thinking the guy would recognize this famous, distinctive breed and know the score?
I suspect the two never spoke. One day Andrew sent a nice little note to William, thanking him for the “thoughtful gift of mutton.” Turns out he needed meat to feed his family, so he butchered William Foster’s delicious plan to breed Merino sheep and carved it up on his dinner table.
Thomas Jefferson was initially so excited about the Merino that he planned to raise a huge flock and donate a ram to every county in Virginia. But eventually the tone of his letters changed when he was discussing the Merino, until he wrote, “the Merino fever has so entirely subsided in this part of the country that the farmers now will not accept of them.” The Merino fleece proved to be too fine for the coarse, more durable clothing the Americans required. So the Merino wasn’t going to be the perfect sheep f
or America.
Shepherds love tinkering with different breeds. There’s an adorable gray-and-white breed, the Herdwick sheep, found in England’s Lake District, which had been championed years ago by an artist and writer named Mrs. William Heelis. She bought land and filled it with Herdwicks, and in 1924 was one of the few women in the Herdwick Sheep Breeders’ Association. Earlier in her life, Mrs. Heelis had written a few little books under her pen name, Beatrix Potter.
All sheep breeds have four legs and a body, but that’s where the similarities stop. Some have no horns, some have two horns, some have four. Some have open faces, meaning the wool stops at the top of the head, leaving the face covered by short hair, like a dog’s. Wooled faces have wool coming down to the eyes, sometimes with one curly lock dangling down over the eyes, à la Michael Jackson. Sometimes wool comes up around the cheeks as well, which is why very long sideburns on men are called “muttonchops.”
Some sheep ears point straight up, others straight out. Sheep fleece comes in every shade of white, every shade of brown or black, and a few reds. Fleece can be solid or patterned. And because sheep have horizontal pupils, it’s intriguing to look them in the eye. (As long as they feel safe—there’s that whole “predator/prey” thing.)
Not only is wool better for the planet than plastic or cotton clothing, but it’s the only fiber with a delightfully photogenic source. No one can get enough cute lamb photos. Regardless of the breed or age, sheepish people know that all sheep are lovely.
Few, however, are as lovely as a certain mix of Corriedale, Columbia, Targhee, Dorset, and Finn, with a little bit of Texel and Shropshire thrown in.
Of Warp and Woof
We sleep, but the loom of life never stops, and the pattern which was weaving when the sun went down is weaving when it comes up in the morning.
—HENRY WARD BEECHER
I continue to knit, and I have worked my way up to a simple ribbed pattern. Unfortunately, I’m still knitting wrist warmers and scarves. I’ve knit wrist warmers for my mom. I’ve knit wrist warmers and a scarf for myself. I even knit wrist warmers for my sister, who lives in Florida, which tells you I’m running out of things to knit. Because I’m still not convinced knitting is for me, I investigate weaving.
Weaving has been defined as the art by which threads are crossed and interlaced. It was done with reeds and plant materials long before wool yarn appeared on the scene. Material can be woven with nothing but your hands, or you can use looms ranging from a hunk of cardboard to a box you set on your table to one as large as your bedroom.
The big looms, with complicated threading and moving parts that bang and shift and create cloth, were mysterious and I didn’t really understand how weaving worked. So I signed up for a “Give It a Try” workshop at the Weavers Guild in the Twin Cities. The class description promised we’d each weave an entire scarf in a five-hour class. I was skeptical.
Part of the reason the instructor could make this claim was because she warped the looms for her students, which saved us six hours’ work and many tears, if we’d had to do it ourselves. I was the first to arrive, so I was able to choose the loom I wanted to use. I zeroed right in on the loom with the purple and fuchsia and blue warping. The loom was called a Baby Wolf, which for a shepherd might be a frightening thing, but I fell in love with it almost immediately.
After a few hours of instruction, we were all sitting at our looms, happily weaving. It’s sort of like that old walking, chewing gum, and rubbing your stomach exercise. First you depress a treadle (pedal) that raises the harnesses that hold odd-numbered threads of the warp. Then, smoothly and without dropping it, you slide the shuttle, which contains the thread for the woof (or weft) under the odd-numbered threads and out the other side. Then you pull the beater forward, which is fitted with a reed, basically a metal comb that snugs the weft thread up to the previous row. Then you freeze, let up on the treadle, then push down the one that raises the evennumbered threads. You shift back the beater, slide the shuttle under the even threads, pull the beater forward to snug up the thread, then use your feet to lower one harness and raise the other.
I found I could do this only if I chanted to myself “down, through, snug, down, up, through, snug.” We were encouraged to change woof threads often, being bold with our colors, and to not create a pattern like five rows of red, seventeen of blue, three of green. “Be random,” the instructor exhorted.
No amount of exhortation from a short, slender woman is going to convince me to go random. After weaving six colors, I looked at what I had, loved it, and found myself back at the first color again. Why ignore a perfectly lovely pattern? The act of throwing the shuttle under the threads became hypnotic. The sound of the harnesses clattering up and down was exciting. By the end of the five hours, I had a sixty-inch beautiful scarf that I’d woven myself.
I could easily get hooked on weaving. Of course, since the Baby Wolf sells for $1,500, I won’t be getting into this anytime soon. But it’s incredibly exciting to have actually created fabric. I used a machine that can’t be much different from the looms used by weavers 5,000 years ago. There’s a weird sense of power in this. If China were to fall into the ocean and could no longer make my clothing, I feel a little better able to do it myself.
The last step is to take the scarf home and “full” it. This is the step that turns the loosely woven, stiff fabric into something soft and fluid using heat and moisture. With hot water and a little soap, I agitate the scarf until the threads tighten up, closing the gaps in the fabric. The fabric becomes soft and fuzzy, with a nap.
For thousands of years this was done by hand, which doesn’t seem hard when fulling a little scarf, but it must have been backbreaking when dealing with yards and yards of fabric. When someone figured out a way to use water mills for fulling, London banned them because fulling had always been done by hand, and to use water energy would deprive fullers of work. Ancient methods of fulling involved walking on the wet cloth, so fullers were sometimes called walkers. If your last name is Fuller or Walker, this is likely what your ancestors did for a living.
Women are brilliant at turning hard work into a social gathering. In 1774, Thomas Pennant came across a group of Scottish women walking cloth: “Twelve women sit down on each side of a long board ribbed lengthways, placing the cloth on it; first they begin to work it backwards and forwards with their hands, singing at the same time; when they have tired their hands every female uses her feet for the same purpose, and six or seven pairs of naked feet are in the most violent agitation working one against the other and by this time they grow very earnest in their labours, so the fury of the song rises.”
What a great idea. Instead of today’s teenagers getting their “exercise” by making four entire circuits of the Mall of America in an afternoon, why not harness that energy by having them take off their shoes, sing Britney Spears songs, and mush wet wool fabric around with their feet?
My scarf is fulled and dry. Anyone who comes into the house is immediately shown the scarf. “I made this,” I say. Why doesn’t everyone weave scarves? It’s so satisfying. Even Melissa is impressed, and she takes take the class herself a few months later.
I seem to like this fiber world much more than I thought I would. I’ve played around with having a few of our fleeces turned into yarn and roving, but I want more.
I continue to knit because it’s so portable, and soon I have enough scarves to keep Canada warm all winter. I begin lurking in the magazine shelves of the library, reading back issues of Spin-Off and Vogue Knitting, finding colorful yarn or a cute sweater pattern. A friend notices the book I’m reading, The History of Wool, and snorts, “Oh, I’ll bet that’s a real page-turner.”
Well, actually, it is.
Counting Bed Mites
Our Lord said, “Feed my sheep”; he did not say, “Count them.”
—DORA CHAPLIN
Shepherds are obsessive about counting everything—pounds of wool sheared, pounds of hay fed, number of straw bales
used, percentage of lambs that survive—but most of all, shepherds count sheep.
Melissa and I started with fifty ewes. Then we had sixty, then seventy-five, then sixty, then forty-five, then fifty. As it should, our farm has a swinging gate where sheep are concerned. They’re born here. Some die, some are sold. But we keep a close count on the number of ewes in our flock because when shepherds meet each other, the standard question is: How many sheep do you have?
We’re all advised to count sheep as a cure for insomnia. Two Harvard psychologists in the 1970s determined that we’ve been given this advice because counting sheep occupies both hemispheres of the brain simultaneously, thus preventing the brain activity that’s responsible for insomnia. Melissa has a cartoon in her office of a man with a clipboard standing in a pasture of sheep. His van says “Official Sheep Census.” Midcount, the man has fallen asleep.
But why count sheep? Why not count chickens or pigs? Is it some sort of “sheep are boring” misconception?
Counting sheep is actually very hard to do because they look alike and tend to mill about. You start counting heads but some lower those heads to graze. You switch to counting backs but they’re moving and shifting and looking very much alike. And if they start running, forget it. So, as an experienced shepherd I can’t recommend counting sheep as a cure for insomnia.
If we, as a culture, insist on counting sheep, perhaps we should use the Celtic sheep-counting system that E. B. White shared in One Man’s Meat. Here’s how to count fifteen sheep:1. Yain
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