New: 5 Days a Week, Your Moment of Zen

I faithfully write a blog post five days a week. Clearly, it's not here, though. In that other world where I'm a teacher, I keep my students and their families updated on assignments and other important information using a blog. A few months in to using the homework blog, I added a daily feature which I call the Moment of Zen in homage to The Daily Show's final punchline of a clip. It started as much as anything because I kept on coming across fun little sites, images, and other interesting in the world that I wanted to share with my students, but also makes a nice incentive to check the homework blog regularly.

The homework blog is also run through a Blogger account, so every time I log in to put up the day's homework, my dashboard reminds me what a poor job I've done keeping up here. It's not that RPM Fiberworks isn't happening - far from it! So, partially to get myself back on here, and partially because I suspect the Moments of Zen have a wider appeal than just my 7th & 8th graders, I will be reposting the Moment of Zen here, hopefully with fiber updates some days as well! To get you started, here's a Moment from earlier this week, with my favorite highlight from the Vancouver Olympics. I haven't been paying too close attention: I don't have cable, and I'm still not entirely comfortable with the politics surrounding use of Coast Salish land, but I do like me some curling and crazy costumes, so there's this:

Moment of Zen:

Olympic Highlights: The Norwegian Men's Curling Team's Pants

Curling may be one of the stranger Winter Olympic sports, involving sliding polished, 40+ lb hunks of granite down an ice sheet, guiding their path by sweeping the ice in front of them, jockeying with another team to have the greatest number of rocks close to a bullseye target or button in curling parlance. It reeks with the kind of creativity peculiar to long, cold winters without much to do. However, whether because of an increased appreciation of this kind of weirdness or because of an increased popularity due to curling's inclusion in Deca Sports for Wii (yes, there is Wii Curling), curling has garnered more attention in the 2010 games than ever before.

Personally, I think it's because of Team Norway's pants. Breaking with the somber convention of black or gray slacks curling teams usually favor, Norway's men's curling squad outfitted itself with red, white and blue (also the colors of Norway's flag) harlequin golf pants for the Vancouver games. Even Norway's King Harald wants a pair. Norway curling hasn't just brought the style though, they've also brought the heat. Well, metaphorically, at least. Team Norway (and their pants) are second in the ranking behind undefeated Canada, and have secured a place in the semifinal round.

2010: Odyssey New

Happy New Year, Folks!
I hope your end of the year has treated you to the company and relaxation it should. A couple nice gifts aren't so bad either. There's another particular holiday I don't like to talk about that falls between Christmas and New Years and means I'm a perfect number now instead of a cube like last year. For that occasion this year, my mom and my stepmom, two of my primary fiber enablers, presented me with a Golding Ring Spindle, which are made in Saxtons River, VT, just north of where I grew up.

How I'm a spinner has been changing. I started spinning about a year and a half ago when the grade 2/3 classroom where I was working had a Louët S51 DT as part of the equipment. Just so long as I spent some time teaching the students to spin on it during the day, I could take it home for nights, weekends and vacations. So, up until the end of August, it was in some degree my wheel. But, with the move up to 7/8 this year, I had to give the wheel back, which was very sad for me. I liked not only the feel of that wheel, but the sense that I understood mechanically what was going on with it. So, when my mom and stepmom moved from the western border of Vermont to the eastern side again, into a much smaller place, my stepmom offered me custodianship of her beautiful Jensen double-drive wheel (she usually uses some model of Majacraft, and largely, her Ring Spindle), I naturally took her up on it. Getting used to the Jensen has been quite a process though, partially because it's so different from the Louët, and partially because it had a lot of older parts. The leather footmen, for example, which connect the treadles to the metal pieces which turn the wheel, both snapped early on in my using it. Also, it's gorgeous and not mine, so I'm doubly afraid of breaking it. Even beyond that, because of the construction, it's never going to be a wheel I feel comfortable just hoisting over my shoulder, chucking in the backseat of my car and taking wherever like I did with the Louët. When it comes down to it, I am and probably will continue to be afraid that I will break it somehow.

And so we come back to the Ring Spindle. I've tried spindling some before, but it feels like there's more of a learning curve than wheel spinning, which is a little strange because the mechanism of it is more intuitive on the whole. The challenge is learning how to use movement efficiently and how to manage the fleece, and those are both going to take practice and accepting feeling clumsy for a while, going back to more uneven handspun for a while. On the other hand, what I've seen Sadelle do with a spindle is pretty impressive, so I know what the unit is capable of making in the right hands.

Best wishes for a happy and healthy new year to all!

Sun of Cheese, Moon of Cheese

As it would seem, all the big grocery stores around here are out of farmer's cheese. If this is a problem, it must be getting close to Christmas, the one time of the year I can justify dragging out the recipe for deliciously cheese-stuffed, butter-fried lumps of wonderful. I could make them stuffed with something else—like many things, they are traditionally filled with whatever you have in abundance—but the family recipe calls for farmer's cheese and sautéed onion, and it just wouldn't be the same without it. And still, I can't remember a Christmas Eve without pierogi.

The traditional Polish Christmas is a Christmas Eve celebration called wigilia, which involves a "meatless" meal of seven fishes and sharing a wafer called opłatek. In my family it has evolved from this into some Polish-Irish-New-England-Hippie take on this, which still involves the fish-focused meal (most years we build a fire and put a fish in it, though this year we're making a festive Christmas jambalaya), but it also regularly involves colcannon, an Irish mashed potato and kale dish with a ring of golden-fried onions on top. And pierogi, which I usually do ahead of time. I suppose I haven't yet totally exhausted my options to get farmer's cheese and make several dozen pierogi before tomorrow night.

I'd offer up the recipe—I don't believe in secret recipes—but, like so many of the things I make I have difficulty quantifying it and writing it down. Also, I can never make the right amount of dough for the amount of cheese filling, so I wouldn't necessarily trust my numbers to work out perfectly anyway. In lieu of that, I offer up my somewhat unique recipe for Sundrop Cookies, which I developed several years ago because I wanted to make a cookie for solstice that tasted like sunshine.

Sundrop Cookies
Makes about 3 dozen 2½-3" cookies

• ½ c. butter (1 stick)
• ½ c. shortening
• 1½ c. sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 tsp. lemon oil or 2 lemons' worth of minced zest
• 2 tsp. lemon juice
• ¾ tsp. turmeric
• ¼ tsp. cayenne (turmeric and cayenne add the color and heat of the sun, respectively, but without one or the other, you still have a pretty good lemon cookie here)
• 1½ tsp. baking powder
• ½ tsp. baking soda
• ¼ tsp. salt
• 2½ c. flour
• ½ c. finely ground coconut (optional—replace with equal flour if you leave it out)

1. Cream butter, shortening and sugar.
2. Blend in eggs, lemon oil and lemon juice.
3. Blend in turmeric and cayenne, if using.
4. Add baking powder, baking soda and salt.
5. Mix in coconut (if using) and flour.
6. Roll into 1½" balls and place on parchment-lined cookie sheet.
7. Bake at 350° for 10-12 minutes.

Et voilà! Dozens of little suns! Happy Holidays and wishes for a sweet New Year!

Maybe They'll Hatch?

I've been sitting on a lot of yarn recently. I don't really expect any of the yarn to hatch (though I wonder what might emerge if it did), it's mostly been a difficulty of getting the right light to take a good picture. As far as I see it, in the absence of professional photographic equipment, there's no true substitute for natural light. My stepmother swears by her full-spectrum OttLite, but I don't have one. And, while there's a lot to be said for compact fluorescent bulbs, mimicking natural sunlight for photography is not one of them. The complication of getting natural light is twofold: first, that most days I leave for work before the sun is all the way up and usually come home after it's down again; second, that there's snow on the ground now, which I welcome, but means that it's not as easy to drag my stock outside with a background and get perfect light.

So, this weekend, I briefly evicted the plants from the bay window in my living room, scrubbed it down really well, laid out the yarn on a piece of white cloth at just past mid-day, and took a lot of pictures. Suffice it to say that this is my new favorite place to take pictures. You can check out and critique my photography by going and looking at all the new yarn listings! New selections include the fruits of the October dye binge with Sadelle (including a few yummy cashmere blends), a number of silk blends to keep you company through the winter, a 100% alpaca and a wool blend prime and tested for socks.

From the October dyeing come the cousins (different colorways dyed on the same base yarn) First Day of Spring and Starry Stairs, a blend of merino, angora, rayon and cashmere dyed on the one hand with a variegation of cool colors and on the other hand with a deep red purple, highlighted by the blue rayon flecks which didn't take the dye. Also from this batch is Tainted Love, a more lightweight wool/rayon/cashmere blend with a spectrum of red and purple overdyed on tan. Rounding out this dye batch is The Green, Green Grass of Home (cousin to Lady Stardust), green overdyed on pale ice blue for a kettle-dyed effect that brings thoughts of warmer weather.

Silk is a fiber of many textures and tonalities, but every one of them is warm and soft next to the skin. Check out the following new yarns with a majority silk fiber: Odalisque, a robust, nubbly superbulky raw silk blend in a deep sunset purple flecked with color, Lost Coastlines, an earthy, tweedy blend of silk and cotton twisting together different warm brown tones, and Of Angels and Angles, a wintery breath of lacy white silk and angora.

Rounding out the additions are the raucously red pure alpaca Rock Lobster and the sock-ready and tested brown wool blend Clothes of Sand.


Also, all orders until the end of December of $10 or more will come packaged in a one-of-a-kind drawstring bag which you could use as gift wrapping for this or another gift or keep for yourself as a gift from me. I make a bunch of these up to deliver my own presents, and they sometimes get more use than the gifts inside them.


I am also very excited to share the formerly top-secret project with my students that I mentioned in my last post: their own Etsy shop, Prisms Place. Every other year, our school sweeps up the whole 7th and 8th grade and takes them by train down to Washington, DC for a week. The cost of this is, understandably, significant. As part of paying for the trip and encouraging student ownership of it, each student is asked to earn $75 through their own efforts. As part of this, I am facilitating the shop for a group of student artists as a way of helping them sell their crafts to raise part of this money. The selection currently includes yarn critters, hand-drawn stickers, uniquely made suncatchers, earrings, made-to-order organic chocolate chip cookies and polymer clay figurines of everything from hippos to sushi (which hasn't managed to get listed yet. Should nudge them a little on that). All on their own, the polymer clay crew made and posted a webcast about what they do. They've also continued this with some instructional videos for making things out of polymer clay.

Yes, I am quite proud of them.

Well, as it starts snowing in earnest here, I am going to take my dog and go play outside before it starts getting dark out. In the mean time, here is Galaxie 500's spaced-out cover of "Listen, The Snow Is Falling," the original version of which was the B-side to the classic "Happy Christmas (War Is Over)."

It's the most wonderful time of the year...

Happy Halloween, Folks!

There are many reasons why this is one of my favorite times of the year: good sweater and quilt-nesting weather, watching the colors in the leaves under the unique autumn light, endless apples and squash and excuses to dress strangely.

This year, I will attempt to turn myself into a squid. The squid costume is still, the day before, a pile of gray and pearly fabric. Magic happens, though, so we'll see what transformation the next 24 hours will bring.

I still haven't totally solved my hard drive issues, but I have figured a couple circumnavigations for getting files from here to there. In that spirit, I offer one of my favorite Halloween songs,
Mel Tormé's "Monsters Lead Such Interesting Lives"

And now, I need to go steam my tamales to take to my students' Día de los Muertos celebration. Until today, I really hadn't gotten any indication of how beautiful their ofrendas would be, but they are quite something to behold.

Getting Your Hands Dirty At School

Fall has...um...fallen here in New England. It's pretty well frosted most mornings now, but gets over itself pretty quickly, just like most of us in the morning.

The school year has started out busy this year, which has kept me as busy as ever, if not more so. I'm back working with older kids this year, seventh and eighth graders, which is where I want to be, but has me on my toes. However, if you're on your toes, you're likely dancing.

While the rigor of the curriculum doesn't leave me the same time to play with yarn, I have been able to slip in the rightful place of arts & crafts here and there. To go with our school's highly integrated curriculum, as part of our study of early civilizations, the students and I got in touch with our hunter-gatherer roots by going out and collecting local dye plants, using them to dye wool felt, then sewing pouches. Although the plant we used, pokeberry, has a bad reputation for not making a lightfast dye, a few sources told me to ignore the hype, use a lot of berries and a lot of vinegar. So far, that advice has done us well. The dye produced a gorgeous maroon red which hasn't shown any sign of giving up any sort of ghost yet.
If you're interested, I've posted the Powerpoint presentation I made about the history of dyeing. It includes sections about archaeological evidence around early dyeing, some of the scientific background (esp. about pH and mordants), and a brief history of purple, the color which draws its name from a very prestigious, expensive dye, which ties into our current unit about Ancient Greece.

Additionally, I'm at work on a still top sekrit project with a group of students surrounding creative fundraising project for a field trip to DC this spring. Hopefully, I'll be able to tell you about it in the next few days.

Until then, I actually have done some more work on yarn as well. Yesterday was another round of dyeing with my stepmother, Sadelle of Pumpkinspun Fiber Designs and Spectrum Webworks, the results of which should be clearer soon. Right now they may be literally frozen as they hang outside to dry. A little frost won't hurt them any, though. This dye session focused on a deep green, a deep red (which mostly ended up purple because of the colors being overdyed), and a fruity purple fabricated out of beaucoup de Kool-Aid. I worked on three base yarns: two heavy light blues and a lacy tan.

Additionally, There are several new yarns available, including several thick, hearty wools in time for cooler weather: "Yesterday's Wine," a maroon with tweedy flecks, and "Walking After Midnight," a dark blue with shadowy accents added in the August dye binge. Also new is "Green & Gray," a soft, wool-rayon fingering weight blend that twines pea-green with gray and white for a skin-soft funky twist.

Photos from the October dye binge, declassified sekrit student project, and maybe more pictures of fall coming soon!

Fiberworks Abroad and Very Close to home

There's not just up and down! There's sideways and slantways and any other kind of way you can think of!

Since last posting, your usually humble staff has driven to Florida (to drop Tom off at school), flown to France (for Tom's sister's wedding), begun a new school year, and made plans for a dyeing project with the students. A full life is generally a good time, but isn't always the most productive (for a very narrow definition of 'productive' which only includes prepping yarn for sale).

There are three sweaters' worth (plus a bit) of yarn balled up and ready to be used again, but it's been so busy I haven't gotten to measure, skein and photograph it yet. It will come soon, likely as soon as I make my new niddy-noddy. As much as I love my ball-winder, there's something very elegant about the classic skein. I had to return my niddy-noddy to its rightful owner, who finally needed it again, so I'm in the process of making my own. I have my $3.00 worth of hardware, I just need to get out the saw and cut the pipe. (Dr. Dirt has great illustrated plans for the niddy-noddy made of PVC piping here. She also has ferrets and a Roomba.). However, that will have to wait until I take MTEL #047 this Saturday, which, much like the Blue Fairy, will descend and transform me from a puppet on strings into a real math teacher! (Obviously, the algebra I've taught under the guise of knitting and the trig I've taught under the guise of art history and quilting don't mean anything - standardized tests wield the magic wand!)

In the meantime, here are some pictures from France. Soon I hope to have a fully-annotated non-Facebook gallery, but for now, that's the option. Because there are so many, I've broken it down into five albums, arranged by place:

• Part 1: Paris
• Part 2: Le Château
• Part 3: The Vineyard and things along the road
• Part 4: Île de Re and at the market in La Rochelle
• Part 5: Poitiers

There isn't much about a fiber arts in there, though I made an as-yet undocumented pair of socks during the week, which have a genuine French wine stain now, but it's still a good time: Sunflowers and cathedrals and crustaceans, oh my!

I am also doing a natural dyeing project with my students coming up soon. We will be using the ink that wrote the Declaration of Independence, and collecting it along the bike path here in Easthampton. I will share as many pictures of the pokeberry-dyeing endeavor as I am legally cool to share. In the meantime, Carol Leigh has some interesting observations about how to use pokeberries. The plant seems to play a much larger role in American history than I knew when I chose it because it grew conveniently and dyes a pretty (if not lightfast) color. The more I learn about this plant, the more fascinated I am - all the medicinal uses? The AIDS research? The poisonous but makes a good boiled green? The pokeberry jelly? Dyeing with this plant makes me feel very rooted where I am, which is a refreshing contrast to all the traveling I've been doing. To be continued...