Hello everyone! My name is Bridget Keith-Tieri and I am one of this year’s Straker Fellows. The Straker Fellowship is unique within the Village because it gives us the time and resources to focus on proficiency of one of the hand crafts, and the hand craft I have chosen to focus on is historic textile production. Over the course of the last seven months of my fellowship, I have partaken in every step of the process from turning a fleece into a wearable garment - sorting, picking, scouring, dyeing, carding, spinning, plying, and knitting. Of these, I only had any experience knitting and dyeing, so the rest of the process I learned at the Village. Since I already had proficiency in knitting, I chose a project that would be somewhat large and challenging - a two-color lacework shawl. This fellowship took me quite literally from sheep to shawl!
I started in September with nothing but a fleece that had been shorn last spring. First a fleece must be separated into wool that is of good quality and wool that is not. Typically, the best quality wool is taken from across the shoulders and along the sides of the sheep, as wool along the backbone is weather-beaten and wool on the belly, legs, and tail of the sheep is too short. I got around a pound of usable wool out of the fleece, which would be more than enough for a single shawl.
Once the desirable wool has been taken from the fleece, it must be picked, which is the process of fluffing out the sticky, matted ends of the wool that are full of grease, dirt, and debris, to prepare it for scouring. Although it was certainly dirty work, I found that this part was actually pretty fun, and I’m sure all the wool grease was great for my hands. Scouring the wool in warm water - approximately the same temperature I might wash my dishes in - and ammonia will remove most of the dirt, debris, and wool grease. Ammonia, called sig or chamber lye in the nineteenth century, is a natural degreaser that could be made in the home. Wool that has not been picked prior to scouring won’t get as clean, as there is no agitation of the wool once it’s wet to release that trapped dirt. It was important to be gentle with the wool because any combination of heat, moisture, and agitation could cause the wool to turn into felt.
After the scouring process, typically the wool would be carded, spun, plied, and then dyed, but the time frame of the fellowship gave me an opportunity to dye while it was still unspun, fluffy wool. I scoured and dyed the wool during the last few nice weekends in September, which meant that I didn’t have to wait until spring to dye the yarn and start knitting. I dyed the wool with cochineal, which is a dyestuff made of the crushed shells of the cochineal insect that lives on the prickly pear cactus in south and central
America and Mexico. I split the pound of wool I had scoured into twelve ounces to be dyed and four to remain white, for the body and border of the shawl.
To prepare the wool to be spun, it must first be carded, or brushed out and rolled up into long rolls of detangled yarn. Carding the wool is one of the parts of the process that could be done outside the home, provided you lived near a carding mill. However, since most of my wool was bright pink, I had to do it by hand, so as to not get pink wool in the machine. Carding a pound of wool by hand is not a quick process, and it took the most time for me out of any step. I was working on carding from October to January and scraped my knuckles on the carding paddles more times than I’d care to admit.
After carding, I spent the next two months spinning the wool. Spinning is the step for which I needed the most practice, and I had been spinning regularly the entirety of my fellowship practicing spinning. By the time my wool was ready, I felt I had enough skill to make some good-quality yarn, although I’m sure I’m a much slower spinner than the average nineteenth century lady. I spent about two months spinning some very thin wool and ended up with about 2200 yards of single yarn, with about 400 yards of that being white. The pink yarn was then plied, with two strands of single yarn being wrapped around each other to create two-ply, which is much warmer and more durable. In all, I got around 1100 yards of yarn, with some still left unspun.
In February, I swatched (or test-knit) a couple of different patterns for my shawl, and ended up choosing a nice Shetland pattern. Swatching is important when choosing a project, because not only do I want a pattern that looks nice, I want a pattern that feels good to me on the needles. I like a pattern that is in between repetitive and complicated, so that it doesn’t end up feeling monotonous but also not overwhelming. The pattern I chose was an eight-row repeat, meaning every eight rows I started the pattern over again. It was a challenging pattern that relied on my ability to keep count accurately over hundreds of rows of lace, which is in itself difficult as mistakes are not usually easily correctable.
Knitting the shawl took about a month, though if this were the nineteenth century, it most likely would have taken much longer. I spent around sixty hours in March knitting, most of which was during this period of social distancing. Those sixty hours would usually have been fit in here or there and typically would not have been possible to do within one month unless you are able to dedicate a significant amount of time to knitting. I have completed the main portion of the shawl, and am waiting until I return to the Village to swatch and knit the white border. In all, I used about 700 yards of pink wool to create the main portion of the shawl, and expect to use around 200 more yards of white for the border.
I’ve certainly learned more than I expected to from this fellowship - and that’s not even counting what I’ve learned working in other houses and from my coworkers about nineteenth century living. This summer, the plan is to work at the dye pit, learning more about the process and the other dyestuffs that were frequently used. I’ve got around 200 yards of pink wool (and another possible 200 yards unspun), which I could knit into any number of smaller projects. Though I am nearly done with my main project, I am looking forward to seeing what the rest of my fellowship will teach me!