Osborn Fiber Studio

I am not going to try to sum up our five-week vacation in one blog post. That would be crazytown. We’ve been back home for two and a half weeks, and being deep into forming new school and work routines, it’s already hard to remember what vacation was like. It was hot, it was green, we spent lots of time with family, and a lot of time doing very ordinary things. But extraordinary things were sprinkled liberally throughout.

We did get lots of quality time with family. We spent a whole week with Jared’s side of the family, at a Christian family camp experience that was super special.

We stayed with Jared’s parents for a while, then with my parents. The girls got to see their cousins on that side, too. Both their one first cousin, and some extended cousins at a family reunion towards the end of our trip.

In the meantime, there were lots of adventures. Roller coasters, splash parks, pools, movies, shopping, haircuts… you know, vacationy stuff. But mostly we hung out. We are incredibly blessed to have such a caring family who loves Jesus and supports what we do, and to get to spend those precious weeks with them, even though we have chosen a life that means we are far away most of the time.

We returned to Nunavut in the middle of August, and were greeted by flowers and rainbows.

And we hit the ground running hard. All three girls started school just three days after we returned.

The girls are in Grade 5, Grade 3, and Kindergarten. So far they are all very happy in school.

The light is strange and yellow because their first day of school was also a day of major smoke in the atmosphere from fires to the west. Fire has been in the background since we’ve been back. In the news, much of NWT and BC is struggling with wildfires, and many of our coworkers in the west are evacuated. Then, coincidentally, the house behind us caught on fire. Everyone is safe, but they lost everything. It hasn’t been the easiest time in our little community.

But not every day has been smoky. Actually, most days have been lovely, and I’ve been able to devote a lot of time the most seasonal of my side hustles.

Labrador Tea

This fragrant relative of the rhododendron has been steeped by Inuit, fresh off the land, for as long as anyone can remember. I’ve probably written about this before, but every year I harvest more and send it to my friend with a tea shop down in Vancouver. This year the order was big enough that I’ve been recruiting help, and learning how to dehydrate the stuff.

At first it was a little stressful, because I didn’t know if I’d be able to harvest enough in time, and the dehydrating was going slow until I figured it out. But I’ve gotten really fast – I know how to find good patches, and I can harvest about a kilo in two hours. Doing that a few times a week is about what my back and hands can handle, so I’m glad some people have been interested in helping out, and that I’m able to pay them [what I hope is] a fair wage. This tea harvest will remain a big part of my life until the snow flies, hopefully not until late September. And how great is it to have something to force me to spend a couple hours outside on every nice day?

Bathroom

Being on vacation always gets me thinking about houses and spaces. I’m getting to middle age, when the suburban desire for the security of homeownership and generational wealth is far more appealing than seemed possible in my rebellious, privileged adolescence. But I got rebuked for my weakness, I got reminded that it’s the Lord we rely on and absolutely nothing else, and I was reminded to be thankful for the home I have.

So when we got home, I had a bit of energy to put into taking care of our house, which is owned by the church. Our one bathroom is badly in need of some love – it was kindly painted by volunteers about seven years ago, but the type of paint was incorrect for a bathroom. After that many years, despite using the fan correctly, the damage had been done. There are other issues as well, with wall sinkage, flooring, grout, and plumbing fixtures, that just come with the house being a bit older.

A donation from one of our family members is making it possible for us to reno the bathroom. With huge amounts of construction happening in town, we haven’t been able to get a contractor in, but we’re doing what we can ourselves. Our first week back was taken over by scraping, sanding, filling, priming, and painting. Possibly the drywall should have come out, or at least been patched, but that was beyond our capacity. At the very least everything is sealed and safe to use now. And it certainly looks good.

A neighbor and firefighter friend of Jared’s is making it possible for us to have new fixtures shipped up in a couple of months. So this is only the beginning of a saga. Jared and I are completely new to the world of renos, but it’s actually really blessing us to tackle this project together, one piece at a time.

Spinning

As I’ve already shared, I got a ton of spinning done this vacation.

Between a daily support spinning practice and my new-to-me e-spinner, I rocked this Tour de Fleece, and I had a lot of fun following the cycling too.

After I got home, I slowed down a lot. You know how it is, being in your own space, being responsible for all the chores and food again. I was surprised how much I enjoyed having that control back over my environment. It really is a huge gift to stay with our parents for vacation, and just not carry the weight of a household for a while. When we were back, I was ready to take up the reigns again. But I broke my support spinning streak after just over 100 days.

I am still spinning on an almost-daily basis. I got a few more of those colourful combo-spin skeins done, which you see above on the right. Then when I got through those, I took on another small spindling project.

I had dyed these one-ounce lengths of Suffolk roving as a demo for episode 98 of the Wool Circle. Of course that series was all about dyeing my 53 dye experiments, and I had taken footage of some of those, but it was sadly lost, so I had to do a bit more dyeing to demo. The end result was what you see above. They will get their own post at some point, I guess. But in the meantime, I have spun all three of these rovings to singles.

These colourways are the same, but the leftmost spindle (and topmost roving) was dyed at .5% DOS, the middle was dyed at 2% DOS, and the leftmost spindle (and bottommost roving) was space dyed with 2% DOS. I’m thinking to chain ply each of these to keep the colours distinct, then use them together in something.

I took a little break from the combo drafting, which you can learn more about in the Wool Circle episode 100. That episode, and the next several, will be diving deep into the world of combo drafting, which is much admired but rarely explored. Anyway, my break ended a few days ago, and I expect to be puttering away at these experiments for the next several months.

Knitting

Continuing this theme of combo drafting, I also spent a good chunk of my knitting time this summer working on knitting up my experiments. I’ve worked up a good buffer of hexies so far.

Again, this will be content for the next few months of the Wool Circle, but as that proceedes, I expect to follow my pattern of recording an even more detailed analysis in pieces here on the blog. This is seriously threatening to leave the realm of hobbies and become something closer to a doctoral thesis, so I hope you enjoy my nerdy ramblings about colour. (By the way, I am adapting the Skep blanket pattern by Kate Davies for these hexagons, and these will eventually be sewn into a blanket.)

I’ve started hexy-ing up not only the combo draft experiments, but the original samples from the dyed colourways as well. The samples I spun up from the dye experiments were generally much smaller and finer, so adapting them into the same size of hexagon has involved some trial and error. Some of them I knit from the inside out; other colourways come in pairs and I can knit them together using intarsia and working them flat. Take, for example, the colourways which I spun both as combo-drafts with themselves, and combed into a total blend. This is one of the split complement colourways. These. are. so. fun.

There have been a lot of hexies. But it isn’t all hexies over here. I’ve already told you about the knitting I did for MiniMighty:

Being 100% acrylic, this was quite off-brand for me, but what can I say? Love for our kids leads us to do odd things.

The other big knitting project for the summer that I can tell you about is the Attune shawl. I started this on vacation and worked on it all kinds of odd places. On a canal boat:

In a historic lighthouse during a thunderstorm:

And during an ASL adaptation of the Shakespeare play “Twelfth Night.”

During vacation, I knit through one of the four skeins of colourful handspun I have devoted to this project. In my new phase of using up yarn, I intend to keep going on this shawl until all that handspun is used up. So I can now say with some confidence that this shawl is going to be yuge.

My knitting life is mostly consumed by hexagons and secret knitting, but I took the time to start a second skein this week. This knit is just as cushy and lovely as ever, though it is getting caught on my interchangeables enough to annoy me. Better think about how to fix that.

The secret knitting has picked up the pace as well. I’m to the phase of working on a bunch of small samples, which are the designer’s equivalent of potato chip knitting, even with all the frogging involved in my predictably odd ideas. Anyway, expect a call for test knitters in the next 6 months or so… the first finish line is still a good year out, but it’s approaching!

I’ll leave you with this picture of Rankin across Williamson Lake, in the center of our little town. Life is weird and beautiful. We’re doing our best, hopefully every year a little better, by God’s grace and with lots of learning. I hope your fall is gearing up to be an exciting one, with enough rest to allow you space for joy.