A View from Sierra County

Spinner In Training

The sage advice when approaching any strenuous athletic event is to begin training early.  As the Tour de Fleece approaches rapidly, I have to wonder if a week of prep is too early, especially for someone like me who as been all about the last minute far too often in my life.  I will be spinning for the Team Sierra Spinderellas and we invite anyone who wants to join us to do so!

I started off by a warm up "spindle in public" session on Saturday afternoon at the Willow Springs Living Skills Day.  Rowen had agreed to set up a spinning area, had really cool "Learn to Spin" kits complete with novice spindle and locally raised gray fleece batt, and invited some of us Foothill Fiber Guild grrls to join in.  I decided right then to make the Tour include both wheel spinning (road racing days) and spindle spinning (mountain climbing).  I am not necessarily going to match the cyclists day to day, but you get the idea.  I managed to finish up my red romney from Sue Flynn's Sweetwater Farm (clearing off my Moosie spindle) and continue working on the Rambouillet/Angora blend from Wooly Wonka Fibers(Rav link).  On Sunday, I finished plying the reds for a nice two-ply, shown below.  My spindle goal for the Tour will be to complete the 2 ounces of Ramb/angora and ply it so I can begin a nice little shawlette from it.  I am very happy with how fine a thread I can spin with my little chopstick spindle, and hoping for a nice challenge here.

Also on Sunday, I began the process of clearing off all of my bobbins and washing the finished yarns. From left to right, the white Rambouillet (from Harvey Farms) is some of the squooishiest yarn I have produced on the wheel to date... I have three partially-filled bobbins still to ply with more of this.

The red tweed is Sweetwater Farms Romney and is spindle-spun on the Moosie, some of the most balanced spindle-spun yarn I have made to date.

The yellow/orange singles skein is some of Wooly Daisy's hand-dyed merino roving, the first thing I spun on the Moosie... I had wound it off onto the knitty noddy, but never finished the skein so it got thrown in the bath and hung to dry too... the grey/green is a bit of Navajo-plied yarn, also wound off a bobbin, and leftover from my Circle Vest project.  Margene gave me the batts, from Spinderellas.

You might have caught that note up above, about having three partially-filled bobbins left to ply... there's half a possibility that finishing the plying task will be part of this week's training, though I might just charge ahead with the other three bobbins I have empty, since I picked up a wonderful bag of two huge batts Rowen had carded on her drum carder, and began 'stretching', and 'training runs', of at least ten minutes a day with this lovely combination of wool, silk, bamboo and sparkle (provided by recycled sari silk!).  My wheel-spinning goal for the Tour is to spin and ply all five ounces of this lovely combo.  The bonus round will be trying to fit in plying that white Rambouillet.

OK, enough about me already... what are your plans for the Tour de Fleece?  Leave me a note in the comments.

Sustainable Sunday: Saying Goodbye to A Place

Here's where it all started.  The reason why I love the outdoors more than the indoors.  Since way back when I was... oh, maybe four.  I grew up in Sacramento, in a suburban neighborhood where I would have been four in the late 1950s, meaning there were still sheep grazing a mile from my suburban home, and hops growing on tall wires, producing 20 feet of growth every summer season, and flowers that went into the making of beer.

We would pile into the car and head out to the ranch for family reunions, or to celebrate holidays.  I would get to run wild with my cousins, tearing about on the lawns or swimming in the concrete swimming pool that looked nothing like the pools I took swimming lessons at every early summer.  My mother had grown up with that pool, and recognized that learning to swim was essential to the safety of her children.

We would take a break from swimming and  climb onto the tractor's trailer bed, then my uncle would pull us through the orchards, full of tall, shady plum, pear and persimmon trees.  The taste of a warm plum still brings those memories back to life.  By then, I was a skinny eight year old, whose hair always was thick but cropped fairly close each spring, so that the summer heat and the tangles of having thick hair wouldn't get in the way (whose way, mine or my mother's?).  We played croquet on the lawn in this photo, or rode  Queenie, my cousin's horse.

The ranch was built by my great-aunt and great-uncle, Mary and John Noia, who were both first-generation descendants of immigrants from the Azore Islands.

They developed the fruit orchard plantings, the reservoir where we learned to fish, and even the gold mine, unused since World War II.

They also nurtured my mother and her two older sisters as if they were their own children, never having had any of their own.

My mother could recall the years of prohibition, when my Uncle John had wine at the ranch, for both daily use and for guests.  I never knew my Uncle, or his brother, Jess, who married his brother's wife's sister, my grammie Jugie. 

Both brothers must have carried the genes for bad hearts.  They both passed away leaving widows, who were the matriarchs of my youth, Auntie Mimi and Grandma Jugie, only a year apart.  My great-grandparents took care of the ranch during the war years, even though they must have been in their seventies; my great-grandmother, who traveled to the US from the Azores ('around the horn') as an orphaned young teen with her own aunt and uncle, had managed two other ranches of her own before, as a young widow.

By the time I came on the scene, the ranch had passed into the hands of my mother's oldest sister, Marcele, and her husband, Clarence.  They had been high school sweethearts, who later went off to state colleges.  My uncle had been a football star, and majored in agriculture, while my aunt became an elementary teacher.  They were able to complete both high school and college in the Depression decade... though now, I wonder how.  The blessing was that there was no war.  Yet.  They lived in Mexico, where my uncle was an agricultural advisor, and deferred having any children until they returned home in the mid-1940s. 

My two cousins were several years older than me, and I looked up to them as idols, goddesses and princesses throughout my childhood.  I was especially impressed that they could knit themselves sweaters ('shells", which were really in back when I was 11 and they were in high school) and that one had her own horse.  My uncle spoke fluent Spanish, had Mexican workers living on the ranch throughout my childhood (thanks to the bracero program), and made us kids practice our Spanish with him as we went through school.  If I had lived in such a way to speak fluently daily, I am sure I would have retained a lot more of that second language!

As I entered my teens, I became a hippie, and can recall several lively discussions about vegetarianism with my uncle, who had converted the ranch to raising cattle as the fruit orchards passed their production prime.  He was still working the land, but a second job as a realtor as well, and I saw the empty hillsides fill up with homes and 'ranchettes'.  We were lucky to be able to visit the ranch at least annually, and still have this enclave of empty foothill land that produced fruit and beef.

As a young adult, I traveled in the west and discovered that the places that resonated the most with me were the ones that resembled the ranch... huge granite boulders, spreading oaks, rolling grassland.  Eventually, I settled in the high country and became a tough mountain woman.  The generation of matriarchs passed on and my parents and aunts and uncles aged, but we still gathered together for a summer family reunion at the ranch.  By the late 1990s, my cousin had returned to raise her young son there, and to help my uncle take care of my aunt, who had developed Alzheimers.  My own parents passed away during that time, then my uncle in 2002, and the group that gathered each year (or two) for a family reunion began to dwindle.  One of my two cousins had lived for decades in Southern California, but the other was managing 4H groups with her young son and raising grass-fed beef, sold directly from the ranch.  We watched as all the elders above us in the family passed away, one after the other, over the decade between 1995 and 2005.

In this photo, my cousin heads out with a bottle to feed an orphan calf (whose mama hadn't bonded with her), accompanied by niece, nephew and corgi.

We had been getting our meat from the ranch for most of this decade when my cousin told me last year that she no longer was selling beef and put the ranch up for sale. 

She was ready to retire from the hard work of ranch life, was happy not to see it through another calving season, and knew that her son, in his last year of college, would be going elsewhere and not into ranching.

Such is life... things don't ever stay the same.  The place that my great-uncle started a century ago will pass into other hands, with other dreams, within the month.

I left my house early yesterday morning to head to my cousin's (about an hour and a half's drive) and pick up some family treasures unearthed in the general packing and weeding out.  Well, actually, the words "general" and "usual" don't apply to disassembling a farm that's been in the family for 100 years; nobody ever threw anything away, especially if it was something that might be used again, or one of the five "parts" tractors that could provide something for the one running, or related to irrigation or fencing, or family history, etc, etc.  My cousin and her son (with sparse help from other family and friends) have managed to work their way through the older house, all the outbuildings, and even the basement of the newer (as in 1914) house, and are packing and moving things to the one-acre place she purchased hurriedly this spring.  The ranch sold much faster than she expected, and she is actually paying rent while finishing up the packing and moving.

It turned out that yesterday also marked the last day of the cattle business....  

We had my truck loaded and had begun tying down the tarp when the purchasers arrived to pick up the last mamas and babies.  My cousin has always raised her cattle with a kind and loving touch, and it was a bit hard on all of us to see the new buyers hurrying then into the trailer in a rougher manner than she uses, but they had never been in a trailer and it actually went pretty smoothly.  Just cow mamas and babies and my cuz feeling stressed.  The cows headed down the road and will probably recover from their stress quickly; I'm not as sure about my cuz, and will be heading back a few times in the next weeks to help out. 

We paused in the shade after the trailer drove away to drink a bottle of water each; the temps already hovering in the high 80s.  Cuz described the family that had purchased the ranch as multi-generational, having been raising sheep and expanding into cattle now as well.  We collectively sighed, while looking around at the vistas to be seen from the barn, and decided that the good thing was they had a big enough family for the work and at least the ranch wouldn't be turned into condos.

I am thankful for the rich memories, and the deep abiding need to live close to the land that I owe to my family members.  As I drove out of the ranch this afternoon, I thought about my 'little grandmother' (as we called my great-grandmother), my Auntie Mimi, my uncle and grandfather gone before I was born, my Aunt Marcele and Uncle Clarence. I left behind the place, the magical land that I have always associated with these special people, but I carried them with me in my heart.

An Audience with the Masters

The Old Masters were considered to be the great European painters before the 1800s.  They set the style and tone of what was considered 'fine art' for centuries.  I have spent many afternoons at galleries peering at these fine works of art, imagining how lives differed in those long-ago times and how they were the same as ours.  The works are often rich with color and some of the scenes of happy, domestic life.

However, it was a different group of works of the masters that I visited with on Monday.  This group of fine artists passed on mostly without leaving their names on their works, but the fine quality shines through all the same.   

DD and I spent the day with The Cutest Niece and Granddaughter in the World, going to visit oldest son (Uncle Cody) who lives in Lake Tahoe... his weekends are Mondays and Tuesdays, and we could only manage to squeeze in the one day, but it was worth it!  This year, summer is late in coming to the high country and the crowds were sparse.  It was a bit windy and cool, so we decided to visit the Marion Steinbach Indian Basket Museum, which is operated by the North Lake Tahoe Historical Society in Tahoe City.

This museum is a relatively new addition to the Gatekeeper's Cottage, a landmark where the Truckee River flows out of Lake Tahoe.  A new wing was constructed just for the basket collection.  When Marion, a lifelong collector as well as a basketweaving teacher hoping to preserve the traditional skills of fine basketmaking, passed away in 1991, her family began working with the Historical Society so that the collection could be transferred and displayed together in its entirety in a safe and appropriate manner. 

I had known of Marion Steinbach as the illustrator of my favorite field guide, used extensively over the years when hiking in the Sierras, Wildflower Walking in the Lakes Basin.  Her love of the plants of our home place was apparent in her delicate and faithful drawings; my field guide has gradually been 'colored in' as I met each plant and added color to the drawings to help me memorize the plants.  She applied the same skill to learning about basketmaking, taking painstakingly detailed notes and drawings when she had the opportunity to visit with a master weaver.  She collected baskets for most of her adult life, and the collection on exhibit contains at least a few hundred baskets of all kinds, and from throughout the West.

This particular grouping contains basketry of the Maidu, the native people who would have sat on my hillsides, both in the higher-up country (in summer) and in my foothills home... their migratory routes ran east-west, and seldom did a person travel more than 50 miles in an entire lifetime, all on foot.

As I stood in the rooms with all of these works of art, I was simply in awe of the huge amount of skill amassed through these works.  There were baskets for carrying peaches from the Navajo (who are known for treasuring their peach trees), baskets for leaching acorns, used throughout California. There are baskets woven to serve as hats, and to give as gifts, and many miniatures woven to show fine skills.  There was a piece, much like a gauge swatch, that had been woven by a grandmother as a reference for her just-learning granddaughter.  Many of the pieces were labeled with information about their makers, but most were not.  While the person was lost to history, their artistry remains on display, every summer season, at this wonderful museum, a tribute to the great skills needed for a culture to simply skip over developing pottery because their basket weavers could meet all of their needs!

Here's a sampling of cradleboards in the background, with DD Nikki, son Cody, and Odessa posing in front.

If you are heading to Lake Tahoe this summer, make room in your plans to spend an hour or two at this great museum, taking in the wonder of another kind of fiber artistry, and the amazing works of so many hands.

Marion would be happy to know that this tradition has not died out; rather, there continue to be those preserving fine basketmaking and expanding the art form.

This summer, beaded masterpieces from Paiute-Shoshone artist Rebecca Eagle Lambert are on display.   These baskets are incredibly rich in design, and while for display only, are woven in the traditional manner.  They are some of the most amazing works of art I have ever seen!

Of course, our trip also included walking along the lake's beautiful shore, and introducing our newest family member to one of my family's favorite places.

Sustainable Sunday: Fourth Principle - Apply Self-Regulation and Accept Feedback

This Sunday we will be discussing the fourth principle of Permaculture, which is a pretty complex one and, again, can be applied far further than just in growing a garden.

First of all, self-regulation involves not taking more than you need... referring back to the motto of permaculture: "Earth Care, People Care, Fair Share".  Taking only your fair share can be difficult to weigh out, especially when you see a great sale, find a lot of treasures at the flea market, or have a lot of land.  Picking up something extra, or on sale, or growing too much are all opportunities to give back.  One of my new favorite charities is Grow A Row, which was established to encourage gardeners with extra space to grow for others as well as their own families.  Their mission statement is:

Our mission is to help those in need through a volunteer effort of planting, picking, and delivering fresh produce, via a unique model that: heightens awareness of socio-economic issues, highlights the importance of local farms, and inspires volunteers across many generations and skill sets.

There are many more examples, such as Heifer International (my all-time favorite charity),and I would love to hear of others in the comments.  Those with the good fortune to have a lot in the form of wages also have multitudes of opportunities to create good in the world, and even a little abundance in the cash department can give you the chance to help someone else start their own business through microlending. Kiva is one non-profit organization that has been at the forefront of this movement.

Thos of us who create can often end up with an over-abundance of goods; this had led some of my friends into businesses and others into massive amounts of charity knitting and sewing.  The maker fulfills their own need to create while using the abundance to take care of others.

We can apply self-regulation in lots of other areas of our lives, such as conserving energy at home and curtailing driving and other uses of fossil fuel.  The solar clothes dryer movement has been gaining a lot of momentum and fighting CC&Rs in subdivisions across the country successfully in order to get more people using less.

However, the truth we really need to face is that we live in a closed system (Planet Earth) with dwindling resources and an exponentially increasing population.  We also live in a culture that is corporate and profit-driven, and willing to take extreme risks with our 'nest'; the massive and uncontained BP oil spill being only the most recent and most dramatic example.  Living with this part of the fourth principle of permaculture not only means making personal changes but advocating for global ones.

The second half of Principle Four, "accept feedback" is equally important.  When something isn't working, face it!  Those of us who garden have a chance to reflect each growing season on errors made, unforeseen circumstances, and things that just plain didn't work.  This season, we had a cold, wet spring here in California, bringing on problems we don't normally see.  The plants that we usually grow are all off to a slower start than usual, the heat-loving ones are very unhappy (think basil), and the bugs and weeds have all gotten a strong head start.  Much of the fruit crops in various locales froze!  We are lucky to have many microclimates and more small food producers than ever, but it is definitely food for thought when I think about what I would be living without over the next year if I only had my own land to live off.

Those of us who create also have many opportunities to accept feedback, especially if we share our work with our peers in safe and non-judgmental forums.  The purpose of feedback is to help in that first portion of this principle, "apply self-regulation" and improve what we are doing so that we don't waste those precious resources.

I would love to hear from others about how musing on this principle affects them.  I also want to wish all the fathers out there a Happy Fathers Day and thank you for the positive work you do.  This has been a sad holiday for me the past decade or so, since the passing of my own father in 1998.  However, I am content on Fathers Day 2010 to see what a wonderful father my youngest son, Jesse, has become with the arrival of Odessa, so I am ending this post with a photo of the two of them and my DH, who has been such a wonderful dad to my three children and his own son.

Sustainable Sunday: The Zone Concept

OK, I know that Sunday is probably at least half-over for most of you; I got sidetracked trying to switch my kitchen over from winter mode to summer mode because we noticed the arrival (or hatching?) of a grain moth or two.  The cleaning process has led to putting some grains in the large freezer for preemptive protection, and baking cookies from one of the remaining gift jars from our Christmas giving.  While the last batch of cookies finishes, I decided to sit down and explain Permaculture's concept of 'zones' to you.

Zones should be thought of as rings, not always concentrics, that define the spheres of influence radiating out from you, your family, or your home.  In principle, life will be much more efficient for you if you begin to organize the features in your life based upon what you touch the most...one reason why people were so overjoyed when indoor plumbing became possible!

Let's start with Zone Zero.  Some permaculturalists consider this your own body, what you put into it and how you care for it in the most healthful and ecological manner.  Others consider it the house/dwelling where you reside, especially if they are designing for the outside portion of your property. 

Today, I will be applying the more traditional design principles, and consider your house as Zone Zero, but when you have finished thinking about all of the components involved in your daily, weekly, seasonal and cyclical life, you will see that within a room or within a house, the concept of zones can easily apply.  For example, not all of your house or apartment gets utilized in the same way.  While your bed, where you sleep every day, will fit as Zone One, that closet where you store your holiday decorations and seasonal clothing may fall into either Zone Four or Zone Five, depending on how you manage it.... but, I am getting ahead of us here.

Zone One starts at your doorstep, and if you have more than one doorstep I am referring to the one you use all the time.  This zone is the area most visited, often multiple times a day.  When gardening, you will want to plant those items that need the most care and/or are used on a very regular to daily basis (or best when fresh).  Structures that should be located in this zone include a greenhouse, trellised items against the walls of the house, a deck or patio (preferably close to the kitchen and with chairs and table for outdoor dining!), birdfeeders (which you want to be able to observe easily and which also require constant refilling), garage or other household storage, and workshop. 

Some of these items may be combined and in the same space.  For instance, our back door goes from kitchen to deer-proof fenced yard filled with the intensive garden boxes we use as raised beds all growing season.  The fencing also confines our two small dogs, who go in and out that door and the yard includes birdbaths which we can observe while sitting on the long, wrap-around porch, or from our kitchen table.  We put most of the potted plants here (best sun/shade arrangement) where they are watered by a misting system set on timer to start in the late afternoon, when temps are hottest in summer here and when we are arriving from our workdays for our 'happy hour' of relaxation.  I haven't addressed the permaculture concept of 'stacking functions' yet, but you can see that we are able to multi-task easily here in our Zone One, being cooled by the mist while enjoying a beer, watching wildlife, and checking the daily health of our food garden!  The primary entrance to our house also goes into the kitchen on the other side, and so plants can be placed there as well, where we can keep an eye on their needs and harvest easily... these plants are the more deer-proof herbs used for cooking, medicinal preparations and beauty.

Zone Two represents an area further from the house, where plants are semi-intensively cultivated.  They may include foods grown primarily for preservation.  Small animals such as chickens, rabbits and bees are generally situated somewhere along the border between Zone One and Zone Two, since you will want to check on them once a day or so, but may need to screen them from view, or to protect them or others.  Compost and worm bins are located here, along with barns and woodsheds.  The average visit in this zone is once or twice a day to once every other day... if you are needing to trek a long distance to care for animals, harvest crops, get tools you need, etc., you will find yourself neglecting some or all of the duties associated with that task.  Move it closer to you or you closer to it!

This is not 'just' a gratuitous baby burro picture... it is the housing shed we built when we got our first burro, back in the fall of 2003.  We started with a small pen, then divided it cross-wise when we got mama April and knew she would need a separate pen for her mothering chores.  Both were a bit beyond the edges of our Zone Two, and once we were able to fence a much larger section of property, to include the old "Carriage House" (remember, our house is from the Gold Rush era here in the Sierras), this shed became a secondary rain shed for the burros, rather than primary feeding one.  The Carriage House is only about 20 yards from our main, Zone One kitchen door, and we feed from there now.  When we decided to keep chickens again, the logical choice was to add on to the side of the Carriage House, nee Barn, and build a coop.  We are still trying to figure out the best way to add an extensive protected chicken run that won't impede the flow of traffic while giving more safe yet free range for the hens.

Zone Three is called the "Farm Zone" and this is where you would locate larger crops grown for cash, large fruit and nut trees (dwarf versions and berries would probably be in Zone Two as a part of house landscaping) and timber.  Large ponds would also be here, along with food storage (think silos here) and field shelters for those raising animals on a larger scale.  Here at Slate Range Camp, the burros spend most of their time in our Zone Three, which is also a wood lot for us... we do not heat entirely from wood, but do use the trees that get storm or burro-damaged over the course of the year and save that wood for the small stove in our kitchen.  Attention to this zone is primarily occasional to seasonal; animals pastured in Zone Three do best having shelter or a portion of their area in Zone Two as an interface where you can check on them regularly, but take advantage of areas you aren't using.

Zone Four is the area still under your care, but requiring a minimal amount of attention.  This may simply the edges of your property, that you do nothing more than weed-whack once a year.  It may also be berry patches along your back fence, a creek running through where you fish or play seasonally, and for those with really large pieces of land under their care, may offer recreation, hunting, timber, and foraging, as well as additional grazing for animals and/or additional water catchment in the form of a large pond or reservoir.

Zone Five is wild!  Most of us do not live adjacent to wild land any longer, though at our high country house we have that great fortune... wild, untended land is a great place to hone your observation skills, to learn how nature manages and what plants grow in compatible guilds.  Here, you will find lakes and creeks and if conditions are good, lots and lots of other life forms.  

Now that we have worked our way through all the zones, let me point out that you can apply this concept to any area, not just agriculture.  For instance, if you are sitting at a desk, reading this on your computer screen, stop and look around at what you use and reach for the most.  Maybe that printer right next to your elbow isn't where it should be... if you only print occasionally, you would be better served relocating it on the desk so that you can more easily reach something else.

I find the Zone system very helpful every time I do major kitchen cleaning.  If there are tools (such as canning jars and equipment) that I only use seasonally, I need to get them off the counters and save that space for daily prepping.  Such items are either on high shelves or in a pantry in our wide side hall that leads to the bathroom/laundry area.  One of the issues I have in the kitchen has to do with being short (5'3 1/2"), while DH is close to six feet... he has put up lots of shelving for me, but much of it can't be reached without pulling out a stepladder.  I finally found a sturdy fold-up one, because every time he brought a stepstool into the house, I saw it as another work surface for a short person to cover with items that needed to be within arms' reach; it was always covered with too many things to quickly move when I wanted to get the waffle iron or espresso machine off the high shelf! 

Design is fun to play with in your daily life, looking for ways to make your surroundings beautiful AND useful, whether you live in an apartment or on a large farm adjacent to millions of acres of wilderness.  Let me know what you come up with!

Learning New Things is Good for the Brain

Scientists who study longevity have stated that we need to exercise our brains to keep them from atrophying, much like we need to work our muscles.  I did my part over the weekend, learning two new skills.

First, on Friday night I filled in at my co-worker Rita's monthly Bunco game... the Camptonville Bunco Gals have been at it for years, meeting once a month to play this fast-paced dice game, and eat and laugh and catch up with each other.  It wasn't too hard for me to catch onto the rules and we all had a fun time.  I was concentrating too hard to even think about taking pictures, but you can learn more about Bunco here (be sure to scroll all the way down!).

Then, after a relaxing Saturday of watching step-grandson's last t-ball game and 'swamping' for DH while he cut down some heavy tree branches that had fallen from the late spring storms at our high country house, I took the opportunity to learn a new skill on Sunday, at a class sponsored by our fiber guild in my neighboring town of North San Juan (how convenient!).

The guild program committee had collaborated with Starlight Compost, one of our members and a basketmaker extraordinaire, to offer two concurrent classes... an Appalachian Butt Basket and a Cattail-wrapped drinking bottle.  I had wanted to take the bottle wrap class last year, when Star's friend had taught it, and I also wasn't sure I wanted to commit my hands to the level required to turn out a Butt Basket.  I signed up and began the search for a creative bottle to wrap and use as a drinking jar all summer, abandoning my choices at the last minute yesterday morning in favor of a quart mason jar with a good, tightly screwed-on lid!

Sue F. had chosen a chianti-type bottle, which made several of us feel very nostalgic, however the shaping is a bit more complex.  We started with a length of cordage made from the pre-dried and then re-soaked cattail fronds, of a length to go around the neck of our bottles.  Mine was wider, so I had to fold over more 'ribs', which are fronds that will serve as the warp portion, however Sue would have to insert additional ribs later when getting to the fat part of the bottle, if she wanted.

She decided not to want to, as she opted for a looser twined weaving around her bottle, partly to get finished, and partly for the nostalgia...

The next photo shows Lindsey doing the twill weave... she really had to work around her flask-shaped bottle, doing what we knitters call 'short rows' to incorporate the glass thumb handle and the flatter shape.

I ended up being thankful for my quart mason jar, a straightforward shape!

Karla worked beside me, only she had a half-gallon mason jar; I finished first, but her's was neater... the procress was fun and interesting, and I would repeat it if I could work with such a lively group!

While we wove, Starlight gave a lot of detailed information about selecting basketry materials and when to harvest them.  Did you know that ALL parts of the cattail plant are edible?  Some are better-tasting than others... the pollen can be used along with flour in baking, the roots can be roasted and processed into flour, the fronds of course are excellent for weaving that doesn't require lots of strength.

Before our day was over, Starlight demonstrated how to make a cord the circumference of your head, then begin braiding a flat three-strand braid which can be stitched around in a circle for a sun hat.  The next photo shows her wearing her hat, while demonstrating how to de-thorn blackberry canes, which are also good basketry materials!

I have always admired her hats, which are available occasionally for sale locally. Star teaches at several primitive living skills events throughout the year, and was going to demonstrate acorn preparation at one of our local schools today. She described that process as well; acorns are very prolific throughout California (and the world!), and were a primary food source for the native peoples here. They could be stored indefinitely, mostly protected by the tannins in their outer hulls, and the various steps of processing could be done by family members of different ages and skill levels. She uses a modern day leaching bucket instead of the old time sand pits and a hand grain mill rather than stone grinding rock to leach the tannin out of the nuts and grind them into flour, and had brought along a yummy cake made from acorn flour and other ingredients, which resembled a torte in texture and taste. If you are interested in reading more about acorn technology, you can search the web, but the best information I have ever found is It Will Live Forever: Traditional Yosemite Acorn Preparation, a book by Julia Parker (a native docent at Yosemite Village that I had the great fortune to see in person about a decade ago).

About the time the four of us bottle-wrappers were launched on our project, the students for the Butt Basket class began arriving, and Star's apprentice, Jed, got them started making the hoops that would be heaven and earth (handle and base) of their baskets.

 

Stephanie appears to be staring out into space here, but really, she was concentrating as she began filling in one side of her basket end.

I can't explain much about the construction of her basket, as I was concentrating on my twining by this point, but it involved selecting materials for both strength and color... some of the materials the seven Butt Basketmakers chose included red osier dogwood, willow, deer brush, blackberry and green cattail fronds (which were only used for decorative color accents, as they aren't strong enough for the weight-bearing portions).

Star explained how stands of specific trees can be managed for best growth by basketmakers.  If you wanted to manage  a stand of redbud, willow or deer brush to harvest basketmaking canes regularly, you would 'coppice' it, by cutting the shrub to the ground in fall and the following year it would put out lots of new, straight growth that could be harvested, rather than tangled and tough old branches.  This practice has been used around the world by basketmakers, and could be employed by any of us in the Sierra foothills, though some agreed they weren't ready to sacrifice their favorite redbud tree yet.

This photo shows most of our group hard at work!  In the foreground, there's a tray of acorns waiting to be peeled... warming them in the sun makes it easier to get their red skins off.

BJ (in teal shirt) is adding in a rib selected from some of the lengths of branches which were pre-soaked (a day per foot of length) and are wrapped in the brown plastic tarp behind her.

Not everyone worked on a basket... Rowen spun the entire time.  We met at Willow Springs, the non-profit center where she has her fiber studio, and her little daughter worked on a bottle.

Here's a photo of my finished weaving... I need to trim up the loose ends to pretty it up, and have it filled with water to weight it down, so that the bottom, where the finished ends of the weaving have come together, can harden and seal up... don't think I will show you that part, as it definitely is 'beginner quality'!

While we worked, our group discussed joining the Tour De Fleece, sponsored this year through Ravelry.  We decided to field a Foothill Fiber Guild team, dubbed the Team Sierra Spinderellas, which Stephanie set up on Rav today... for those on the fence about trying to spin through the entire Tour de France, consider joining a no-pressure team such as ours!

We are a fun-loving group, and will be gathering back at Willow Springs to demonstrate spinning for a Living Skills Day on June 26th from 1-6 PM.

Once I was finished with my bottle, I decided to spend some more time with my new favorite toy, a chopstick spindle with a jade whorl that allows me to produce a lovely, fine yarn from a rambouillet/angora blend from Wooly Wonka Fibers... yes, I really do lead a magical life, and I try to be grateful for it every day!

Sustainable Sunday

This is a quick note to let everyone know that I will be exercising one of my four 'week off' options (over the year from April 2010-March 2011), as we are very behind schedule out-of-doors!  The weather has been adverse and finally moved to a more benign place in the past few days, though feeling a lot more like late April than early June.  I hurried around transplanting things late into the evening, trying to outrun mosquitoes (seems like all the less desirable things, like mosquitoes and weeds, were able to carry on despite the unseasonably cold spring weather, though the veggies and fruit suffered badly), and now will have to wait and see what 'takes' and what had stayed in pots too long.  I have some good, old stand-bys in the ground, including several heirloom tomatoes and bush beans, as well as some unusual new plants, including a passionflower vine and two Sochi tea plants to grow some of my own black tea!

Up in the high country, at our other house (which was where our children all grew up), the late and heavy snows took a toll, smashing up all kinds of trees in the conifer forest that surrounds us... Glenn and I spent the afternoon clearing up, he working the chain saw and I piling slash to be burnt.  We lost half or better of one 100-year old black locust tree (which also took out branches from other trees and knocked over our picket fence), and a very large branch from another locust tree had come down on the roof, though with no damage to the house. 

The black locusts were planted by gold miner families over a century ago, as well as many of the heirloom apple trees... many of our apple trees up there were good enough to wait to start flowering, which probably prevented frost damage but may mean they can't produce their crops before winter.  Overall, I have to say that fruit at both elevations (high country and foothills) will be about 50% less than usual....I did cut a lot of rhubarb, which has also been at our high country place since long before us, and brought it home to the lower elevations to freeze for later!  It was a bit nostalgic working at our old cabin, as we wander around caring for things such as trees, waterlines, reservoir, that surround our Forest City house, we can see the memories of our combined stepfamily of four children as very young people... now grown and moved on to adult lives.  Wow, we are getting old!  I am so very glad to have winter bid adieu, and even if spring is only a week long (summer feels like it is trying to hurry on in today!), look forward to the warmer days and longer evenings!

I will continue to discuss permaculture principles next week, and also to elaborate a bit more on how you can use the zone system to plan changes to make around your own place as the warm weather brings us out to work with our landscapes.