Sweet spring yarn, & sappy bread story
But not at the same time, because that would be messy
Hello Friends! Happy May. I have just a little bit of news for you in the categories of Farm and Shop. First, lets pay some bills…
With the summer farmers’ market approaching, we will be scaling back with yarn preorders, but there is a great one this month! Our Quarterly Walk With Us club includes options for one-time or quarterly purchases. The colorway for May is Rescuing Lola and is based on that time Bill saved a newborn fawn from our creek. There’s an excerpt from club newsletter at the end of this email, and here’s the yarn:
The stripes are bursting with spring! A thick band of Spotted Newborn Fawn, and even stripes of Spring Sky, Yellow Aster, Redbud, and New Leaf. This yarn is available for preorder on any of our yarn bases through May 12. (Current Quarterly club members will be charged automatically on May 6. Watch your email!)
There are a couple of new ready-to-ship yarns added to the shop as well, including a discount batch of Desert Superbloom (the May, 2023 club colorway) – where I dyed the stripes in a different (and mysterious) order, but the yarn is still super pretty!
Finally, the monthly (or bi-monthly) batt club is switching to new themes for the next six months! I’m particularly excited for the Bold Batts theme of Contrast. We’ll be exploring different forms of contrast in batts and discovering how they look in finished yarns. There will be a gradient that transitions between complementary colors, batts with pale colors blended with saturated colors, and some with light wool combined with dark sari/noil (or dark wool with light add-ins).
The batt pictured demonstrates contrast, as I’m thinking of it, in two ways: the saturated teal contrasts with the pale yellow, and the wavy locks of Romney are a texture contrast with the smooth wool. This will be the most experimental (and maybe wacky!) of the four themes, and is perfect for adventurous spinners.
The other new themes are what you’d expect from me as a dyer! The Calm Batts theme is Grungy. The batts will be a variety of colors blended with dirty neutrals. The gray/blue batt is an example of the color feel you can expect.
The 3 month color run will be Gentle Vanilla in May, June, and July. I use the same dye formula for the theme color each of the 3 months – for this theme, it will be like the French vanilla in the center of the brown batt. Each batt will be different, but all will contain some of this color. This theme is great for spinners looking to combine multiple months into a bigger project.
Farm news!
We’re moving into the bread-iest time of year! Bill bakes weekly for our farmers’ market (and I wash bread dough out of endless containers). He makes many types of sourdough, focusing on whole, ancient grains. He also makes cheese bagels. People really love cheese bagels.
Though we both really enjoy bread, I think the bigger enjoyment comes from how this form of making connects us to the community. The market provides us with the ability to make money so we can buy firewood and hay, which is important to the running of our farm, but the relationships we form and the ability to be part of our neighbor's meals is important to our soul. Showing up to the town square, in front of the court house, each week becomes a ritual for us. And, for a customer, picking out a fresh loaf of spelt sourdough every Tuesday evening, becomes a ritual for them and their family.
It’s a very special thing that we get to do. I feel it every time someone shows me a photo of their chicken sandwich or breakfast toast.
Making bread used to be a very communal activity. Hundreds of years ago, very few people had their own ovens, so everyone would gather together every few days and fire the community oven and take turns baking their bread. It is said that different families would score different patterns on their bread loaves to keep track of which was theirs.
Because of the different lenses through which I view the world and human relationships, whenever I think about this, I wonder how much fulfillment and cooperative skills we’ve lost by living in a time when we exploit fossils for fuel, and thus have the energy and materials to provide one oven to every family, instead of one oven to every community. It’s quite a long conversation we could have about this subject – with many twists and corners. We’d obviously have to bake some bread together and discuss it for hours.
But, in the meantime, we are using our own, personal oven(s) to make eclipse pizza and birthday pretzels for the friends we’ve made through the process or providing bread in our community. It’s really quite cozy. And delicious.
As promised, here are a couple of paragraphs from the story Bill wrote to accompany the Walk With Us club colorway, Rescuing Lola. If you purchase a skein of this colorway, or join the quarterly club, I’ll send you a copy of the whole newsletter.
Thank you so much for your interest in our shop and farm. Sending Spring Joy to you all!
On the day in question, as we approached the stream a loud screaming started. It sounded a lot like the distressed cries of a baby goat, of which we had plenty back in our pasture. Our first thought was that one was in trouble, and got it self in a sticky situation, we would need to double-time it back to tend to whatever mischief had developed. After a moment, we realized the screaming was actually originating near the stream, about 40 yards North of the bridge.
It took a minute for us to locate the source, but there it was. A newborn fawn, flailing and yelling, in the water.
Let me pause here for a moment to discuss walking, and socks. If I rewind in time, to the days when I was too tired for walks, that Bill of the past would never have imagined the simple joy of having sock rules, and picking out my socks in the morning based upon the weather, in anticipation of our daily walk. Wet and Muddy? Need the taller, hard wearing socks for inside the muck boots, probably the Regia. My favorite walking/sock combo is birkenstocks with soft bouncy handspun socks. Happy feet all the way. Preferred for cool dry autumn days, and I look forward to the pairing. Many days, it’s “normal” superwash, and whatever shoes are appropriate for the activities of the day. On this beautiful spring day, as luck would have it, I was only wearing sandals. Not optimal, as our road is gravel, and I end up with rocks poking my feet, but on this day it was fortuitous, as I would soon find myself knee deep in the stream.
It’s a pretty steep embankment from the road next to the bridge down to the stream, then heavy brush along the banks. After about a minute of bushwhacking, I found the fawn. It was a baby girl, about 10 minutes old from the look of things. She was trying desperately to stay above water, but not having a good time of it. The bank where she fell in was about a 3 foot drop straight down into water that she had no hope of managing. Even I had no hope of managing the bank at that spot. She was just barely able to keep her head and neck above the water to avoid catastrophe. Carefully, I collected her, and waded upstream to safety.
LOVE those colors!