Today I’m going to take a different turn in the blog posts. We have had quite a few folks ask us why we moved “way out to Ashford”? And the simple answer is the location, but that doesn’t really cover it. I’d say 50% of “location” refers to the beauty of the area, having land, and the abundance of wildlife. The other 50% of “location” is our visibility along the main road leading into the Paradise entrance of Mount Rainier National Park.
Pat and I have… unusual hobbies. A few years ago he became interested in blacksmithing. He bought a cheap tool cart and modified it into his first coal forge. Since then he’s acquired and handcrafted more tools and learned many skills for creating things out of chunks of metal. He has been posting more of his work on our Facebook page, so feel free to pop over for a look at his work.
I, on the other hand, like working with soft things, like, want-to-roll-yourself-around-in-it soft. Have I mentioned before that we once owned alpacas? No? Well, we did. Only two alpacas made up our herd and they blessedly found a new home after one broke my foot, so it was not a long lasting bond I had with the camelids. But my love for alpaca and sheep fleece has been ever-growing!
With Pat’s blacksmithing and my fiber arts, we are hoping to open a small tourist shop next summer with this fantastic location we now call home. How it will go, only the future will tell, but we have hopes for a nice little business – nothing extravagant – that will allow us, at the very least, to afford our hobbies. Having had the alpacas and the knowledge/skills to process a fleece from it’s raw state into a usable product, I was amassing a large quantity of raw fleeces. Raw fleece means straight off the animal, still full of dirt, vegetable matter, lanolin (if from a sheep), and possibly poo on the rear end. The problems I was facing, though, were time and ability. While I have the tools and knowledge to process the fleece, I don’t always have the ability to do so with the arthritis in my hands or the time to process, and spin, and make a product. I went through my growing stash of fleeces and picked out three alpaca fleeces, one Blue Faced Leicester fleece, and two Miniature Southdown fleeces for processing at a mill. There is one located in Yelm, WA and I immediately took my goods to Dawn’s Custom Carding!
On Monday the angels sang and presented me with ROVING. Lots of roving!
Alpaca fleece #1
Alpaca fleece #2
Alpaca fleece #3
Previously processed (with my drum carder) and spun portion of alpaca fleece #3
Blue Faced Leicester fleece (my favorite wool breed to spin)
Babydoll/Miniature Southdown fleece #1
Babydoll fleece #2
I have been working on a pound of Shetland roving and have just one more 4-oz batch to spin and then I’ll start trying to figure out where to begin on this next endeavor. With so much white roving and a few Dyer’s Polypore mushrooms drying (as much as I can try to dry mushrooms outdoors in the rainy season), I’m hoping to do some natural dye experimentation in the near future!
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