The SNHU class is finished, although the term didn’t go as strongly as I’d have liked as a result of the earlier chaos, and there are some things I do need to revise before that course runs again. Still, I was proud of the troops for hanging in there, for trying, and for doing what is ultimately a drafting and brainstorming process—which is counter intuitive to what they’re accustomed to (creating a finished, polished text). In an eight-week course, and when the purpose is to give them an orientation and hands-on acquaintanceship with a specific form of writing, the best you can do is create drafts and think of the last version as a more polished draft.  That’s not easy for them, and I do understand that.  But I hope they’ll be encouraged to continue to work with the texts they’ve begun, to see the potential in them and the possibilities to adapt them to different publication markets, or simply try their hand at a new essay and experiment with the skills they’ve picked up.  Generally speaking, they did very well, and I was indeed pleased with their work.  Creative writing classes really are a joy to work with, even if the term is a chaotic whirlwind.

Likewise, the Norwegian students are finished, and I’m down to marking exams.  This coming week has two deadlines I need to meet (including finishing the exams), but here too I’m pleased with the students’ dedication and willingness to try things which are unfamiliar in order to learn a new technique or method, new concepts and ideas about writing and literature.  And, here too I see changes I need to make to the courses.  There are certain tasks and approaches with which the Norwegians are less familiar than their American counterparts, and as a result, I need to adjust a couple of assignments to keep them from panicking and stressing as much as they are.  For the stateside troops, it’s all part of the routine.  For the Norwegian troops, however, it’s uncharted territory and I’d rather they went into those tasks with more confidence and a stronger foundation so that they weren’t so intimidated by assignments which should absolutely NOT be intimidating.

So, I have work to do.  Fortunately, I have the better part of a year to do that tweaking.

And after this week, I’ll have time to figure out where the heck I am on other projects.   I’ve decided to just call this semester a wash; it’s been far from normal on any front, and the past month has been filled with minor surgery for DH and the creeping crud for us both, so I’m thinking of July as a sort of fresh start.  There are simply times when you need to do that and, in a manner of speaking, write off the immediate past as out of the ordinary, know that you’ve done the best you could with it, and pick up where you left off before that period of time.

Fresh starts.  Whether they’re daily events or a bit more infrequent, they are important.  They give us a chance to reconcile, to catch our breath, to reassess, to renew.  Without them, life could easily become overwhelming at times.

Fresh starts and cheesecake.  What more could you want?

We’re getting there.

I started to say that there has been very little fiber activity over the past month, but there’s been more than I realized; those odd little moments as you wait for one deadline or catch your breath between assignments really add up!

I’ve agreed to do a spindle workshop in October, and suddenly Marianne (one of my spinners) and I found ourselves demo’ing spindle and wheel for a random collection of folks at the local 4H farm on the 6th.   It was an odd day, and Marianne and I ended up just having our own cozy little spinning meeting, but we did have the chance to put a few folks on a spindle and show them that there is more to spinning than the old black-and-white pictures they remember about their great-great grandmother carding unwashed wool outside in the yard of the family farm.  Most of them have no idea that they can get prepared spinning fibers, and I have to say that I really think that the best way to tempt people who are otherwise NOT interested in fiber in spinning is not to hand them a greasy fleece—but to hand them a bit of clean, well-prepared and brightly colored roving.  For those who are already interested in spinning, it’s a different question and starting with fleece can be perfect.  But the average person off the street who has no prior interest?  Most of them think of it as stinky smelly stuff and feel a pressing need to wash their hands immediately afterward—and you can’t really blame them, particularly if the fleece they’re handed is not a handspinner’s fleece.

With that in mind and with the idea that I’d use the materials for the October workshop, I went ahead and brought in a teacher’s pack of Babe spindles and dyed some Brown Sheep rovings.  So, we had these:

And these:

So, there sat Marianne and I, spinning and giggling at the absurdity of being placed in a corner which was largely outside the traffic pattern, surrounded by her handspun and some colorful rovings.  Odd, but still fun.

At least I’m all set for October!

And there have been a few yarns finished in the interim . . .

It’s just Corriedale, but Crown Mountain Farm does wonderful colors. This is an old colorway I don’t even know if they still carry: “Azure Dreams.” Spun semi-woolen, thick-thin, and 2-ply, for 7.5 ounces and 516 yards. I seem to be the queen of thick-thin these days, and I’m figuring it is just a side-effect of the past few months’ instability. Profound as it is not to say, spinning seems to reflect life these days, and I think we can safely say that life has been fairly uneven. The WPI ranges from 11-18, but I’m very into soft yarns, so it’s a lovely squishy stuff which will knit up into a wonderfully smushy fabric for someone.

It’s Norwegian White in the “Kentucky Derby” colorway from Spunky Eclectic. A bit less than 12 ounces, spun thick-thin and bulky with a TPI around 4 in order to keep it fairly soft. WPI ranges from around 28-4. Lightly fulled, 478 yards.

Norwegian White is one of those wools which is too coarse for me, but which spins up into a surprisingly lofty and relatively soft yarn when it’s spun in low twist singles.

In contrast, there was this:

Organic Merino roving from Spunky Eclectic, in “Storms of Jupiter” colorway. Spun semi-woolen. A worsted weight at roughly 10wpi, 365 yards, 215 grams, in a true 3-ply. Very soft, and very squishy.

And this:

It’s not grey. Really. But I can’t get it to take a good photo! It’s a deep blue-green in various hues, spun thick-thin as a low-twist single. The fiber was a gifted handcarded batt from Ullsmeden, and consists of 50% Norwegian lamb, 35% Merino, 15% Tussah, and a bit of Angelia. The fiber lent itself to a thick-thin textured single, and there are 219 yards in the 3 ounces, ranging from 6-22wpi. I’ve no idea what it’ll become, but it needs to be something special.

And finally, there was this:

It’s what I call a corset yarn. The core and one single are spun in one direction and plied together, and the final single is spun in the other and plied with the 2-ply. The fiber was “Sweet Grass” Polwarth batts and roving from Enchanted Knoll Farm and the color is more moss-green than appears here. But I’m not satisfied. I underestimated the strength of the colors in the batt, and overestimated the colors in the roving, so I didn’t have the distinction between the core and the laces I wanted. Nor have I got the tension quite right, so the laces aren’t spaced the way I want them. Nevertheless, it’s a soft but moderately firm and very squishy yarn.

There are 49 yards in the little 2-ply remnant (10-16wpi thick-thin), and 221 yards in the corset yarn (9-12wpi).

I’ll get it right the next time.

Looking ahead to the future, I gave in to temptation. This just arrived:

It’s a fleece from a coated CVM ram named “Rifle” and it’s already clean; Morro Fleece Works did a wonderful job on the wash. For the moment, I’m going to tuck it away. It’s a very spongy wool . . .

and I haven’t decided how I want to spin it. It has incredible elasticity and is very soft, I combed a few test locks, but I’m not entirely satisfied. I need to sample a bit, and I’d like to see what happens when it’s blended with a bit of Merino and silk.

And there, friends and neighbors, you have the scoop. This is the last week of deadlines until August, and July 3rd starts the Tour de France—which means it also starts the Tour de Fleece. For those not in the know, the Tour de Fleece is a daily spinning event; it’s a way of cheering on the riders for the Tour and doing a bit of stash busting. Do I have any idea what I’m going to spin? Heck no. Ask me next week.

But I find myself wondering about students now and then, and their expectations of educational programs, education in general, and us as teachers in particular.

One of the classes I just finished with required 4 novels over a 16 week period, a short essay of 1200 words, and a final exam.  Not much, truth be told, but it’s not my course.  And I suppose that’s another part of the reason I don’t talk much about teaching;  very little of what I’m doing is actually my own course design these days, and I miss that incredibly.

However, while I’m accustomed to students complaining about the workload, a recent conversation caught me off guard simply because of its blatancy.  The student hadn’t read the last novel, and had no intention of doing so.  S/He’d attended the lecture and therefore “knew what the story was about.”

Right.

It was useless to explain that the lectures only provide context and analysis issues, and certainly don’t cover everything in the novel, although I did try.  I even resorted to the “you probably won’t manage the exam if you don’t read the text” desperate appeal, but since the student had cleared an earlier exam without having read the text, it wasn’t precisely convincing.

I don’t know which is more distressing:  the idea that a student actually COULD pass an exam without having read a text (and no, it wasn’t my exam), or the fact that a student registers for a sophomore/junior-level literature class with no intention of  reading the literature.  “I’m studying literature.  Just tell me what the story says; I don’t have to read it.”

There’s something horribly wrong with that discussion, and I find myself torn between frustration, incredible irritation, and a certain depression.  The latter because there’s absolutely nothing I can do about it; it’s neither my system nor my course.

Sigh.

Getting OFF the soapbox and moving on to fibery stuff, you’ll have to wait for fleece until the next installment.  I’m determined to get off the computer for a couple of hours tonight and do a bit of spinning.  But I do have a  little to show you.

First, I promised to teach a class of about 47 students (in 3 groups, I think) to spindle.  It’s just an orientation, and is the primary reason why I’ve been spinning a few funky and novelty yarns.  And yes, I have a couple to show you, but first there’s dyeing.  Allowing 2 ounces of fiber per student, there’s six pounds of Brown Sheep mill ends roving from Carol Lee at The Sheep Shed Studio.  It’s perfect fiber for this kind of thing; it’s cheap enough that no one is traumatized if it ends up fairly well destroyed, but has a good handle and makes for a nice yarn.  It’s great for training and getting new folks started, and I’ll admit I’ve worked my way through about 15 pounds of it for just that purpose.  The only drawback to the mill ends rather than the regular rovings is that the roving isn’t necessarily consistently wide; some sections are thinner than others.  But it still works, and the kids will do fine with it.

Scott (their teacher) told me that they seem to be into bright colors at the moment; he noticed that as they got into their weaving segment. I took him seriously.

This is a fairly bad photo; I couldn’t find a place to photo all of it where there was halfway decent light! And you certainly don’t get a sense of the scale of things, but there are 87 braids there, and each braid is made up of a 6-foot long or longer length of roving. MOST of the colors are done in batches of 10, except for the crayon-rainbow batches, and I think there are about 20 of them. There is ONE subtle, earth-tones batch just to show that all fibers don’t have to be glow-in-the-dark shades.

We have a pepto-pink with splashes of yellow (which don’t show in the photo):

There’s a flame orange with splashes of yellow (which also doesn’t show), the brown, and an orange (which should have been red) with splashes of pepto-pink:

A slime green (much brighter than here) with splashes of blue:

A blue with splashes of red and purple, and a host of primary-color rainbow fibers:

and

and

And last, a yellow and purple (which looks like black/navy in this photo):

Whew!

Do you reckon they’ll be happy? At least this gives them a choice! Or several.

I have, however, realized that braids are truly horrible ways to show fiber. It’s impossible to see how the colors pattern themselves across a roving; you only get a sense of the colors and not the structure of those colors. Normally I wrap the bundles into birds’ nests, but transporting 87 nests is a lot messier than transporting 87 braids. So, for the sake of organization, you’ll have to settle for the braids.

Spinning has been a bit eclectic, and the goal has been to gather enough of a variety of yarns to be able to show the students (teens, remember) that there are options and handspun yarn can look like any number of things—and need not look like rag yarn if you don’t want it to. So, in addition to what’s already in the stash, I’ve run up these . . .

First, I realized I had no singles in my stash. Everything is plied. I know why I don’t; I don’t want to have to worry about skewed fabric or finding a pattern specifically for those yarns. I’m lazy. But I need to at least show them that you CAN spin a single and, given certain considerations, knit with it. So first there was this:

This is Icelandic, hand-dyed by Spunky Eclectic in “Snow Squall.” It’s spun a bit thick-thin, as softly as possible, and for a total of 271 yards.

And then there was this:

This is another Spunky Eclectic fiber club fiber. It’s Romney, hand-dyed in the “Goblin Eyes” colorway. There are 8 ounces and 244 yards, and I deliberately spun it thick-thin. The dye work is lovely here, and the photo doesn’t do it justice. The colors look like velvet and are much richer in real life.

Both singles are low-twist and as softly spun as I could manage. Much to my surprise, I found that the Icelandic needed more twist than I expected—and fulled much more readily than I expected. Only a bit of grace and a lot of luck saved me from having a felted mass for that one, and determined to get it right, I span and fulled the Romney next. It came out nearly perfectly. The Icelandic, on the other hand, has three knots in the skein simply because I underestimated how much twist was actually necessary and then had to reconnect. That’ll teach me to get cocky!

Then, however, things got funky. First I ran up this:

Four ounces of Spunky’s “Pie for Everyone” Falkland. (Are you seeing a theme here?) It’s plied with Anchor’s glitter viscose crochet cable yarn/thread, decidedly thick-thin, and there are 46 yards.

Then I used the other half of “Pie for Everyone” to do this:

It’s a thick-thin, plied back on itself with feathers, felted balls, and silk fabric. I suspect the silk bled a wee bit and is the reason the yarn is a bit more mauve than the other “Pie,” but I don’t mind it. There are 71 yards.

And finally, a simple, dignified novelty yarn.

I had about 4 ounces of a red superwash, so plied it with metallic thread and sequins for a worsted-weight very soft yarn with a bit of glitz and glitter. This one actually surprised me a bit, but I rather like it. For the record, the WPI = 12, and TPI is about 7. There are 131 yards; enough for a scarf of some sort eventually.

And that, friends and neighbors, is the last of my novelties for a little while.  The rest of the week is going to be spent indulging in fleece.  Lovely fleece.

Every class is different, and this one is no exception to that rule. There are 17 students, it’s a fully online class, and there were 133 posts to the introductions forum alone. They’re an eclectic group, with a surprisingly high percentage of psych majors, and I’ve been really impressed with their willingness to tackle the questions and topics. They may not always like a text, but they’ve been exceptional about preventing that dislike (or conversely, like) from blindsiding them into groundless opinion without foundation or even comprehension of the text. That’s unusual. Many students decide they don’t like a text—often because it doesn’t meet their expectations of what “story” should be—and automatically shut it down without seeing whether it has anything to offer.

This group is working hard to avoid that.  I’m impressed.

Things have been busy with a lot of cleanup from last fall and some startup for this term, but there’s been some fallout, too.

General Academics/Teaching

I had an interesting conversation with a teacher a little while ago, and I find it still bothers me. The gist of it was that “good students will do well; poor students won’t.” The context was the Norwegian university environment, where required activity and participation is nearly nonexistent. Students nigh well operate in a sort of “independent study” approach, with one large lecture per week, and limited 45-minute small groups which meet once each week for part of the term. Attendance at lectures and small groups is voluntary, and grades are established by a single final exam at the end of the term. The recent budget cuts have made a system which provides little structure to its students even more unstructured; it requires even less of them. Students who have good study and academic work skills when they come into this environment will do the extra work and will at least survive; those who come ill-prepared, however, will struggle and may well fail.

That statement bothers me for several reasons, not the least of which is that it is simply a fallacy to assume that students come to college or university already established as students. While we can place the responsibility for study skill development on the student’s shoulders to a certain extent, we cannot assume that all students have high quality—or even sufficient—or equal degrees of preparation. They are certainly not carbon copies of one another with the same educational, environmental, familial, and personal backgrounds. Equally problematically, working under this attitude does not allow good students to hone existing skills, or poor students to learn how to become good students. In essence, it throws away the poor students before they ever arrive on the college’s doorstep.

I have a problem with that. In my own experience, students come to college moderately clueless about what they’re getting into. They shape their understanding of the environment and the new interactions and the new requirements within that first academic year. Only then do they really begin to grasp the planet on which they’ve landed themselves. It strikes me that to not provide the structure to help them make that adjustment is both shortsighted as well irresponsible on our (academia’s) part. College is not high school in a new location. It is certainly all part of the academic family, but making the shift is a learning experience all its own, and I firmly believe that if we want to encourage success in our students, we need to lay the groundwork. If we do not, then “poor students won’t do well”—but the fault will be as much ours as anyone’s.

This Week’s Reading

“Turn of the Screw” by Henry James, “Roman Fever” by Edith Wharton, Magret by Anne Karin Elstad (the second in the Folket på Innhaug series; in Norwegian), Eldest by Christopher Paolini, and The Care and Feeding of Spinning Wheels by Karen Pauli. How much more eclectic can one get? (By the way, the Eragon movie? If you read and liked the book, don’t waste your time with the film; it’s a waste and a terrible shame given the rich potential of the written text. The only folks who seem to like it are those who’ve not read the book.)

Writing

Recently, I had the opportunity to listen to Anne B. Ragde—author of Berlinerpoplene, Arsenikktårnet, and a host of other things—while she talked about her writing and herself as writer. One of the things that particularly caught my attention was what she believed were the key elements to any good fiction: motor og troverdighet, or drive and believability. There must be something which makes you turn the page, and you’ve got to be able to buy into that story. This is something I’ve tried to explain to younger writers, and it’s something we have to work at incorporating in our own work. What we say may be interesting but there must, after all, be a point. There must be a reason why we thought this particular story was important enough that we needed to write it—and important enough that our reader should read it.

“Believability” is a flexible concept, but equally important. While what we might believe changes from text to text based on our expectations of that text, we still have to be able to accept that characters behave the way they do, or that circumstances are and become what they are, and we have to care about those characters. The moment we stop caring or believing, that’s the moment we put the book or story down—and at that point the writer has failed.

I was pleased to see how solidly Anne B. understood those concepts—I would have been surprised had she not—but I appreciated too her sense of her writing as both work and craft. I think this is something that comes with time, but I’ve yet to see a successful writer who doesn’t make these very basic concepts a part of his or her writing identity.

Knitting

There’s been precious little of that happening since the legwarmers were finished. What there has been is:

Spinning

Since I finished that first test bit of spinning, I’ve been slowing working my way through some 3 ounces of Cormo roving. I have to admit that I like that wool! It’s very soft, and while I know my spinning hasn’t done it justice, even the finished yarn is soft and squishy despite a good amount of twist. I still have to work on consistent thickness and keeping my joins from turning into blooming blobs (literally), but I can look at this skein and see a real difference between it and that first test spin a few weeks ago.

It was not, however, a completely painless process. I really missing having a warm body at hand to point out when I’m screwing up or overlooking something which more experienced folks would do automatically or consider common sense. As my favorite Chief Master Sergeant once told me, “The problem with greenhorns isn’t that they don’t know enough to ask questions. The problem is that they don’t know enough to know what questions to ask.” That said, the reality is that I’m just a stubborn wench determined to figure things out, so I really don’t mind stumbling into things. If nothing else, it makes the learning process entertaining.

For instance, did you know that you should stop your single when you have a bit less than half the amount to fill your plying surface? You did? Ah, then you sorry bugger, why didn’t you tell me? (grin) In the process of spinning those three ounces, I cleverly (I thought) joined every new spindle-full to the end of the previous one, ending with roughly 200 yards of a single single. Since I wanted to make a large skein with no knots and as few joins as possible, I thought that was rather clever. I loved my long single, admittedly in part because it gave me a chance to even out the twist over longer lengths. The problem is that there is no way to fill your plying surface and keep plying without breaking the yarn and starting with a new batch. Once the spindle or bobbin is filled, you have to cut it and start again. Of course, if you only have one spindle and no wheel, that makes the problem even more annoying.

Coming to that realization was an adventure. I tried moving my singles from the spindle to nøstepinde to spindle and back, then to a combination of both, then to a center-pull ball. The house looked like a scene from Arachnophobia; singles were spun everywhere, and nothing—not even DH—risked moving. Thanks to some good advice, I finally understood that what I was trying to do was frankly impossible and that I needed a bigger plying surface. In other words, I needed a bigger spindle.

I improvised a CD spindle on a 24″ shaft using a 3/8″ dowel, a couple of CDs, some foam packing wrap (no grommet), and lots of tape. Ugly as sin, spun badly, wasn’t exactly ergonomic, but it worked. I unplied the several yards I’d already plied and then got busy. A few hours later and thanks to a couple of chairs, some miscellaneous furniture and body parts, a couple of dowels from two disassembled paper-towel holders, a yarn swift, a pot, and one entertained hubby, I had tightened the formerly-plied singles and plied the entire length with the CD spindle. I set the twist last night and hung the skein to dry, and I have to tell you that I’m pleased with my progress. I have another four ounces of Cormo to spin, and we’ll see how it compares with this first batch.

Wanna see?

I didn’t measure it, but based on what came off the yarn swift (oh, yes; it came out to play too), there should be somewhere around or above 75 yards.

For gauge context, there’s a dime on the left, and a Norwegian 1-kroner piece on the right.

You can see where I struggled with consistency because those areas bloomed more than the finer strand around them. In most cases, those were places where I joined the fiber. It’s something I need to work on.

On other fronts, MIL has decided I should use her grandmother’s old wheel. I don’t have much history, but I do have a little. MIL knows that her grandmother bought the wheel at a farmer’s market type of event (Martnan) in the Skogn area (Norway) in 1881, and that it was used when it was bought–which means that it’s older than that purchase date. She has no idea how old it was when her grandmother bought it, and I have no way to guess at it. A valuator would be able to figure it out, but all I have to go on is that conditions in Norway at that time weren’t great, and possessions–especially tools–were definitely not considered “disposable.” That means that the wheel could have been anywhere between a couple of years old or much older, and sold for economic reasons, or because the original owner died and the family either didn’t want or couldn’t keep it. The last option is less likely than the first given the Norwegian tendency to keep “arvegods” (inherited items) in the family.

The wheel isn’t in the best shape; it’s going to need a lot of work. The leather bearings are gone or need to be replaced, the footman needs to be replaced, the treadle is cracked, the wooden nails are slipping out of the wheel and need to be tightened, one maiden is broken, and the flyer is missing. All of those things are actually no big problem given a carpenter/woodworker, except for the missing flyer. The odds are that it was broken and then thrown out without someone realizing what it was, but I think we can find a similar wheel in the area and build a replacement. With luck, the neighbor—who happens to be a master carpenter/woodworker—will be interested in taking on the challenge. Cross your fingers.

13 Jan UPDATE: The neighbor did indeed agree to see what he could do. Even if the wheel never again spins properly, at least it’s now in safe hands and a part of DH’s family heritage will be preserved. That alone counts for something.