(energetic music) - I was raised in a military background and I was really troubled by that military background, and so in college I became very interested in non-violence, which led to Gandhi, which led to spinning, which I don't, you know, it's many, many iterations removed from where I started.

I just never imagined it before, and of course what I do isn't related to what Gandhi did.

He was talking about a liberation movement in India with, you know, from the British textile industry, but I work with wool and linen and so it's been far removed from that beginning.

(energetic music) I should say Steve, my husband is the shearer.

They're big and that takes a lot.

You have to really have a lot of control of the animal the whole time you're shearing.

So he's the shearer.

(energetic music) I wash the wool before I process it and get it ready for spinning.

You don't always have to do that, depending on how you want to process your yarn and what kind of yarn you're looking to make.

Because I use the yarn that I spin mostly for weaving, rather than knitting, I process the yarn in a way that it, what I use is a technique that involves combs.

So these are combs and this was the older way, there are several ways to process fleece to get it prepared for spinning.

When you comb fleece, there's a couple things that go on.

The first thing is that you maintain a parallel formation of the fibers.

They stay laying right beside each other, and when you comb fleece, you want to maintain that parallel arrangement and it makes a yarn that is really strong and it's kind of a no nonsense yarn.

It doesn't have air in it, it doesn't have fluff in it, but because those fibers are just laying right beside each other, it's a really strong fiber and it works well.

Excuse me, it's a really strong yarn and it works well for weaving, especially.

(relaxing music) (sheep bleating) (relaxing music) Spinning is a really interesting process and that it is what turns fiber into yarn.

So when I start spinning, what I'm spinning with is just called top, which is prepared fleece, and what the spinning wheel does is it simply introduce twist into that fiber, and what you end up with is yarn.

It's sort of this magic thing that happens as you introduce twist into it, and wool is uniquely suited for spinning.

(relaxing music) So spinning is the process of just turning fiber into yarn.

What's going on here is that the spinning wheel is introducing twist into the fiber, so that what is between my hands here is just fiber, but what is beyond my hand, between my hand and the spinning wheel is already yarn.

So this is all it is, is twisted fiber, and what you spin when you first start is just a single yarn.

There's only one strand here.

The yarn that a weaver puts on their loom is called the warp, and the warp is under a lot of tension and it has a lot of abrasion from the beaters and the heddles that are part of the loom, and so you want a really strong yarn, and typically weavers will not use a singles yarn for their warp yarn, which means what they're going to do is to take at least two strands of spun yarn and they'll turn the wheel in the opposite direction.

Right now, my wheel is going in a clockwise direction and then what I'll do to make a plied yarn is that I'll hold two or more strands of the spun yarn, I'll hold those two together, and I'll wrap them around each other so that becomes a two or a three ply yarn.

(relaxing music) Another textile that I've worked to learn how to make and to make is the boat rya, and they were designed for the men who would go out fishing to take with them on their boats to keep warm in the North Sea, and originally people would use just pelts for that, but it was found that in the salt air, the skin side of the pelt would become hard.

So it would sit like a board on top of you and not keep you warm, and so the boat rya was made so, it imitates a sheep fleece.

So these were really fine blankets if you want to stay warm in the north seas, this is the kind of blankets they were sent with.

(upbeat music) I think I'm drawn to the possibility that we could know a process from beginning to end.

We don't have an opportunity to do that very much in our lives.

I mean, all of the clothes that we normally wear, they come from who knows where and who knows what, what fiber is even in them.

You know, they can come from 15 different places.

They can be, you know, the fiber can be raised in one place and sent to another for processing and another for weaving and another for dying and another for cutting out and making, so our textiles are quite removed from any understanding of where they came from and they don't have a lot of meaning for us either because they're fairly abstracted from us.

We're fairly alienated from that process.

I don't want to be in the position in my life where I have to make all of the textiles my family needs.

I'm really glad, grateful to be liberated from that kind of intense labor that women used to face, but I think it's too bad that we've taken this completely out of our hands, literally out of our hands so that we don't even know what goes into providing our clothing, and so it's a way of developing a relationship with the animals or the plants or the dye materials that provide us with these things.

If we have at least the opportunity to know some of that and keep that knowledge in human hands, that seems to me to be a valid thing.

(upbeat music) A lot of the natural fibers are being replaced by polyesters or synthetic materials that are made essentially from oil.

The difficulty with that is that they're petroleum products and they don't biodegrade any more than our plastics that we, you know, buy our milk in or whatever.

They're, they don't biodegrade.

It comes pretty cheaply.

It's made pretty cheaply.

It's worn, sometimes I mean, I read like the average length of a time a person actually wears a piece of clothing is like five to seven times before it's landfilled.

(upbeat music) I think making your own clothing, or at least some aspect of your own clothing, can foster an appreciation for clothing itself and to gain some idea of the amount of labor and care and also intelligence that goes into clothing.

That was where women could really think and could really be creative, and we see it there and we've lost that, and I think that if we can come back to an understanding that that is actually a platform on which we can find expression and we can find joy, I think that it is perhaps an act of rebellion, but I also hope that it's an act of joy, (reflective music) but I would say my weaving didn't become good weaving until I started taking classes from weavers who knew what they were doing, and I started taking classes at Vesterheim and I know the, I can date what my weaving looked like before I started having relationships and friendships with other weavers and they were showing me and teaching me how to do things, my weaving vastly improved, just being around other weavers, (reflective music) and even just the joy of coming to a place where you've mastered something with your hands, your hands have the muscle memory in them and so that you can trust your hands to do that, and you can just simply watch your hands do those things.

There's a lot of joy in that, that we are just in our industrialized age and our push button age really not exposing our children to, and I would wish that we would do that.

(reflective music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) - [Narrator] "Postcards" is made possible by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

Additional support provided by Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies.

Mark and Margaret Yackel-Juleen, on behalf of Shalom Hill Farms, a retreat and conference center in a prairie setting near Windom, Minnesota.

On the web at shalomhillfarm.org.

Alexandria, Minnesota, a year-round destination with hundreds of lakes, trails and attractions for memorable vacations and events.

More information at explorealex.com.

The Lake Region Arts Council's arts calendar, an arts and cultural heritage funded digital calendar showcasing upcoming art events and opportunities for artists in West Central Minnesota.

On the web at lrac4calendar.org.

Playing today's new music, plus your favorite hits, 96.7 KRAM, online at 967kram.com.

(upbeat music)