Spinning

Last week I learned how to spin so I’ve been working on trying to get the technique down. Although Candace told us not to look at the yarn we’re producing (Cindy is learning with me too), Candace said that it looks good. Here is a picture of the loom room. My spinning wheel is the one on the left. We moved the spinning wheels into this room because we needed to get them out of the way for an Alpaca 101 class that they held yesterday. They had a great turnout for the class…one of the attendees came from five hours away. So, I continue to work on my spinning technique so I can create my first skein of yarn.
I finished weaving another scarf. Here is where we trim the fringe and lay our items to dry, after washing them. This area is in the same room as the looms.

This is a commercial loom that someone donated to the center although I’ve never seen anyone work on it. The building where all of these looms are located is in the back of the White Violet Center and it used to be the laundry for the sisters. All of the items would come here to be washed in a commercial laundry area. All of the equipment was ripped out and the sisters are now responsible for doing their own laundry. There are two laundry areas on each floor in the building where I live, as do many of the sisters. One of the sisters must be responsible for putting out fresh towels in the rest rooms cause if I get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, there’s a fresh towel there. I swear there’s a towel fairy that works hand in hand with the tooth fairy, making evening rounds. 

“Seconds” of fiber, from the skirting process that are located in the fiber room.




The skirting table and the bare shelves where “blankets” of fleece are usually kept. We have all of White Violet’s blankets done. We’re now working on some fiber that was donated to the center. We spend a lot of time on snowy days, sitting around this table skirting fiber.

The brick building, on the right, is the White Violet Center. You can see the smoke stacks of the big furnaces for the complex in the background and the steeple of the church in the left corner.

Sister Ruth was hired to do a portrait of a family’s pet donkey. This was done by felting fiber onto a wet felted base material. She did an awesome job making it look just like the photo that they sent.

I’ve entered two photos into the National Alpaca photo contest. Once all of the entries are in (deadline is 2/18), then I believe the photos all go up on the web for folks to vote on them and the ones with the most votes, from each category, will be printed and sent to Harrisburg, PA (how appropriate that the contest will be back home) to be on display at the National Conference this year and a judge will pick the winner in each category. Wish me luck !!
Not much else going on. I’m on “close” duty this week so in another hour I’ll be going out to check the alpacas water, hay, minerals and condition of the animals. We check to make sure they are all set for the night and Mariah will need to have her physical therapy where we hoist her up with the sling and pulley and exercise her back legs while the weight is off them. She didn’t do so well with it this morning, not wanting to stand at all or put weight on her legs. Hopefully she’ll do better this afternoon.
I think it was last week that I had a really profound and powerful moment, as I was sitting in my room. I was working on the pink scarf on the loom and looked over at my bed. When I packed stuff to come here, I packed an afghan that my grandmother had given me many years ago that means a lot to me. I brought it in case it was cold in my room. On top of that blanket I also have a small lap blanket that my mom made recently because I was freezing a few months ago when the weather started to get colder and I couldn’t get warm. I also have the shawl, that you’ll recall my sister made for me that I wear around my shoulders when it gets chilly. I saw all of these things that great women in my family have made for me and it really struck me (it’s making me cry just to write about it). As hard as my grandmother and my mother tried to teach me, as a kid growing up, how to crochet or do “crafty types of things”, I could never “get it”. Back then my fine motor skills were way better than they are now. I seem to be all thumbs and have no coordination at all now and I’m not sure what that is all about. But I have learned to weave and I’m learning to spin and I’ve learned to felt and I felt a really strong connection to these wonderful women in my life that have done this stuff for so long. Pardon my pun but I felt like a fiber had connected all of us with a commonality that I’d never felt before. It was a strong epiphany for me in that moment and something I will always cherish about what the people here have taught me and given to me.
I hope your week is a powerful one and one full of inspiration and love ! May you find a connection to something new or rekindle a connection to something forgotten. Make the most of the week in front of you.

Merry Christmas from Indiana….

It’s Christmas eve and it’s very quiet in the convent. The other two interns left on Friday to spend time with their families. Linda was hoping to come out here right after Christmas to spend some time with me but couldn’t find anyone to watch Boomer. It’s tough enough to be apart for the holidays but now she is sick with something that resembles the flu. She has body aches, a high temperature, and a sore throat but decided to go to her son’s house anyway so she can spend time with them over Christmas. It would really suck to be home for the first time in the seven years, that we’ve been on the road full-timing, and not be able to spend it with family. Should make her feel better.
I work with Ann in the morning, on alpaca duty, so it will help her get out of here sooner. I’m on alpaca close all week (takes me about an hour each afternoon at 3 p.m.) and watering the new seedlings in the greenhouse. Somehow all of these critters and plants don’t understand that it’s a holiday for people….they just know that they need to eat and be taken care of and those activities don’t take a day off. Tomorrow, after I do the close routine, I’ll go to Sister Maureen’s house to have dinner with her and Sister PB.
Last week we moved thirteen alpacas to their new home, about 30 minutes from here. It wasn’t too bad to halter that many animals and load them up. Two of the thirteen were put in the mini van for the ride to their new home and the rest were loaded into a horse trailer. There is a large lake near their new pasture. When we got them into the new area, they took off for the fence and just stood there looking at the frozen lake. I don’t think they’ve ever seen a body of water like that before. I don’t know if it was either the smell or sight of it that intrigued them so much but they thought it was the coolest thing. There are several more crias to be moved but they won’t go until they’ve been weaned from their moms. Peanut is one of the crias that will go to a new owner. That will be a sad day….I’m hoping that it will be after I’ve left in February.
Yesterday I finished skirting the last blanket of fleeces from our alpacas. Wahoo ! Sister Mo thinks that this is the earliest that they’ve ever finished with the skirting. Now we will start in on some of the fiber that another alpaca farmer gave us from his farm. The goal always is to get each year’s fiber processed before it’s time to shear again. The fiber that has been skirted can now be shipped to the New England Alpaca Fiber Pool to get processed into hats, gloves, scarves, boot inserts, etc. for our store in the White Violet Center. I’m still hoping to learn how to spin and weave before I leave here in eight weeks. There are some workshops coming up in January and February that I should be able to take that will teach me those things.
I’m putting the finishing touches on my project for my internship. Each intern is required to do a project while they are here. My project is on how the dining units can benefit more from the produce raised in the gardens here as it ties into the land ethic that the sisters have created. It’s a twenty page report that I’ve been working on for the last three months so it will be great to see that done and turned in.
It was really cold here this morning. With the wind chill, it was –5 degrees. Once the sun comes out, the temps in the greenhouse really heat up. When I went to water the seedlings at 3, it was 80 degrees in there. Everything is covered in the high tunnel….nice and comfy. The thing that we have to watch is that when the sun comes out, it can create a lot of condensation on the roof of the high tunnel.

If it gets too drippy in there, the plants will start to rot so that is when we need to open the sides or ends to ventilate it and get the condensation out of there. We haven’t had to do that in quite a while because it’s either been really cloudy or cold. We keep an eye on it though.
Guess that’s all that’s going on here. We’ve missed some of the recent snow and ice storms, which is fine by me. Hoping everyone has a blessed Christmas and a prosperous New Year. Until next year, be safe and have fun with friends and family this holiday season.

Fall is in the air….

Fall is in the Indiana air and the leaves are turning. Yesterday, in the tomato patch, it was downright chilly but not quite to the point of frost. I could see my breath as I picked tomatoes and they felt like they had been kept in a walk in refrigerator all night. They are slowing down though….only picked 274# yesterday.

I keep forgetting to tell you about the neat way that the convent creates their heat for HVAC purposes and hot water. They have a tractor trailer that picks up wood chips, that local landscapers and tree cutters have dropped off. There is a collection center across the street from Sisters of Providence and the tree trimmers just dump their waste there and the truck goes over and fills up and brings it back to campus. There is a metal shed type of building where the truck backs up and dumps the load. Inside are these conveyor tracks that very slowly pulls the wood in (they take all the wood left off and put it through a wood grinder to make sure it’s uniform in size). My understanding is that it goes into a furnace that heats the rooms and water for the whole complex. There are two huge brick chimneys coming out of the building where all this happens and the building is pretty large. Reminds me of the exterior wood stoves that homes have that can do the same thing….heat the hot water that is piped through it and also send heat to your home. This is just on a gigantic scale. I’ve been told that one tractor trailer load lasts for a typical day and 1.5 – 2 in the winter.

Here are some of things we harvested this week in the garden:

Look at all that celery….it was like loading a small tree into each bag. And it was so fragrant…Yum !

Beautiful Carmen and Bell peppers.

 

 

 

Bagged Swiss Chard…looks sort of like rhubarb but with beautiful stalks of pink, yellow, whitish.

 

 

 

On Thursday we had a potluck event for the CSA members. I finished work at 3:30 and then went to work with Sister Mo so she could teach me how to card the fiber I’ve been working on. This is the next step after skirting it. You take the tufts of fiber that are long enough and it’s laid on that ledge area so it spans the width of the carder. On the far right side is a crank that makes the drums turn and draws in the fiber. The “undesirables” are picked up on the small drum and the acceptable ones are wound around the large drum. When it gets covered to the point where you can’t see the belt seam and it seems full, the “batt” is pulled off the drum. You break the batt, with a large knitting needle type of tool, right at the belt seam. You just run the needle under the batt and pull up on it, separating it from the drum. As you turn the handle you pull gently to have the batt come off in one piece. You’re shooting for it to weigh (in its final weight) 1.0 – 1.2 oz. I had to run mine through twice to get all fibers running the same direction and looking nice and it came out at 1.1 oz…perfect ! The weight is crucial because if you use this to felt a hat, the layers have to weigh the same so it’s not lopsided when you put it together. That is what I’ll be learning next….how to make a felted hat. (This morning I finally finished skirting all the fiber on my table)….hallelujah ! So I worked on the carding till 5, went back to the dorm and showered and made my dish to pass and off to the potluck I went. Long day, beautiful night, great chats with the CSA members who came.

Friday, the new high tunnel got its’ roof installed. There was about 10-12 of us out there helping get the plastic on it. Ropes were thrown over the top of the roof and tied to the plastic. The way they did that was to wrap the plastic end around a rock or clump of dirt and then tie the rope around it. The wind came up as we started to do it and I asked Sister Mo to say a little prayer for us. She asked Saint Joseph to give us some calm so we could get this done and wouldn’t you know it, once we retrieved the end flap that had folded up over the peak of the roof, it got real calm and we were able to finish it up. We only wound up with one hole in it that was easily patched. Next week David will finish up the side and ends so we can get it planted. It’s huge inside and will hold lots of plants.

Tomorrow is Alpaca Farm Days all over the country and ours is from 1 – 4. I will bounce between the kids activity area and the tomato selling table, helping out. Should be a fun day if the weather holds out. We haven’t had much rain since I’ve been here but they are calling for about a 60% chance tomorrow. Hopefully it will rain early or hold off till afterwards.