Ye Olde Batt: Awesome Retreat

I am back from the Blueberry! What a great weekend..... I got lots done.... of course I didn't sleep hardly at all.... about 4 hours a night.... but that's ok because I had a blast!! I finished my mawata.... (I'll tell you all about that)... I finished my silk/cotton sample... (I'll tell you all about that)... I did a little toward my cotton on the Charkha sample.... (I'll tell you all about that).... and I started on my cabled yarn for my wrist distaff.... (I'll tell you all about that too)! Quite a bit of the work I did was for my level 3 homework, and I am starting to feel a whole lot better about that. The food was awesome and I was a little worried that I had gone easy in organizing the food and not had people bring enough...... yeah! right! like that is likely! These ladies never bring too little food. We eat like sheiks and we wouldn't do better aboard a cruise ship! We even had 4 cakes...(one was a birthday cake). You can't beat that! It was sunny and beautiful with excellent roads for traveling and I even sat out on the deck in short sleeves and NO SOCKS

on Saturday and spun for a while. Except last year, (when I went to Victoria for a conference) I've been going to the Blueberry retreat for seven years. I love our annual Blueberry retreat.

I started work as soon as I got there hemming a shawl that I had woven last summer which I showed you pics of a while back. That didn't take long and so I then started working on my commercial silk hankies which are colourful and bright and a whole lot of fun to spin. I spun about six of them and then plied them, and then they were so fine that I thought a cabled yarn would be nice..... so I re-plied them so that there would be lots of energy in the yarn and then cabled them..... (this is probably too technical for you non-spinners but bare with me and I'll be talking about normal stuff in a little bit). I loved the cabled yarn from silk hankies

and suddenly I thought this would be great for my cabled yarn question for my level 3 homework...... I will talk some more about this in a little while.... One of the ladies who was at the retreat has been learning Chi Gong and so she took us all into the other room and taught us a little Chi Gong.... exercises are good when you eat lots and sit lots... laughing is good exercise.... but Chi Gong gets you up and moving. : )

I went to my room and pitched my sleeping bag and crashed with the full intention of sleeping well..... but..... that didn't happen.... by 4:48 a.m. I was wide awake and dying of thirst. Heat control is an issue at the Blueberry. The people who run the Blueberry lodge decided a few years ago to put in one of those huge wood heat systems where the fire box is in its own building and wow... can that produce heat. I have learned not to bring long sleeve anything with me because I just about die from the heat..... and drink..... I suck back huge quantities of water while there in an effort to stave off dehydration. I still come home with my lips chapped and skin itchy from dryness. Anyway.... in the middle of the night I had to go visit the water cooler and ended up drinking almost a litre of water. I did go back to sleep but not for very long before I heard people up and moving around so I got up too. There was a lady downstairs making coffee and boy was that stuff strong. Even with milk in it, it looked like tar..... but that wasn't a bad thing... after a night with very little sleep good strong coffee perks you up.

Saturday I decided to leave off spinning silk hankies.... I already had a nice bit done and I really wanted to work on my silk and cotton sample. I had chosen to use Supima combed cotton rovings and Bombyx silk rovings for my blend. Both of these fibres are the supreme top quality preparations, I think, for their fibre types. I was looking for a cotton yarn with and sheen almost like mercerized cotton. Well this took a little fiddling since when you blend, staple length is an issue and cotton is way shorter than Bombyx silk so with scissors in hand I cut the silk..... (believe me I had to cringe each time I snipped!) Then I weighed it and measured it to get a 50/50% blend. Then I tried combing it but that didn't work so I carded it with my Ashford all purpose/cotton cards.... and made punis.... (sorry to you folks who have no clue what I am talking about) I spun it with a point of contact drafting method and by the end of the day I had a fairly consistent 3 ply yarn.... which disappointingly had less sheen than I wanted.... that is, till the sun shone on it the next morning. This isn't a very god picture...

It is quite nice. Meanwhile while this was going on I cooked a ham for supper in the kitchen and made a blue mawata. One of my fellow Master Spinners students who is in level 3, had decided we should make a mawata while at the Blueberry and I was all for having company for this dastardly job. A mawata is a way of preparing silk from a cocoon for spinning. You have to boil water with washing soda and soap in it and then soak your silk cocoons until they soften and then pick out the worm and poop and then stretch the cocoon out over a square frame into a shape that looks like a hankie. My cocoons had been previously dyed blue in a mason jar on my deck in the summer sun a few years ago. So I have a blue mawata.

The whole process is a nasty job and though generally I'm not squeamish this is one job that totally disgusts me. The worm is bad enough but the poop is just plain gross! Anyway, I now have that done too. Once it was rinsed in water and vinegar I left it to dry.

After not sleeping much on Friday night I got pretty tired along around mid afternoon so I went and crashed for twenty minutes.... not long but long enough. When I came back downstairs... some of the ladies had moved to the deck to spin so I did too. It was simply divine to sit out in the sun after a long cold winter and spin and chat with no socks... it reminded me that I am so lucky to live in Northern Canada, and it reminded me that spring is coming, and it reminded me how good it is to have friends that you enjoy being with, and it reminded me of how nice bare feet are! There was a dog hanging out at the Blueberry..... I think he belonged to the caretaker and there was something so casual and satisfying about spinning in the sun... friends to chat with and dog by my side with a gorgeous view out over the valley, some might call it contentment.

Sunday started very early. I woke at 5 a.m. and remembered that I hadn't washed the shawl that I had hemmed on Friday night. I figured I had better do that. So I got up and washed a shawl long before anyone woke up and then I hung it out on the rail on the deck to drip.... the dog was there so we bonded for a few minutes and then I asked him not to lift his leg against my shawl... no worries there since he is a very well mannered dog. Later, I was showing my Charkha to anyone interested, when I realized that I had enough cotton spun in singles that I could use it for the sample I have to do on a Charkha or quill wheel. I just have to ply it today and I'm done.
For the rest of Sunday I spun jewel toned commercial silk hankies so I just need to finish that today as well, and do some writing... label it all and then mount it in my binder. I feel very satisfied that I worked well at the retreat and got lots done.

I really could have stayed another day but that was not to be..... when I got home I realized that the only person I never got pics of was the gal I traveled with.... how dumb.

So here are some pics from the weekend.....

We spun....