A quick series of images to show the process of transforming a cotton boll into a puni ready to spin.

first published on my old blog Trampled by Geese in 2015
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Leave a comment if you want me to make a video or more in-depth tutorial on working with cotton.

​We have two little greenhouses; old cracked glass things just tall enough to have to stoop and a footprint of 8 foot by 10.  They are cute as buttons and really, for the amount of hot stuff we eat, it should be enough.

Some years I plant my seedlings in the soil, and they grow like stink.  Other years, like this year, I do everything right - I amend the soil with various manner, let the chickens in over winter to eat all the bugs, do all the thing - and everything fails.  This year's peppers were planted with care after the last risk of frost, on a cloudy day.  The next day the sun came out and scorched the poor little seedlings.  The day after, it was nearly frost.  

But that's the way our weather goes - hot during the day, cold during the night.  And these tropical plants (mostly hot peppers) don't seem to thrive in these conditions.  

Some years it works, but this year, it's been a dismal failure!

​Click "read more" on the right to ...

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• Avoid all humans.
• If one must interact with a human, stay at least 2-meters away from the strange human.
• I'm the owner and only worker here.  I'm going to keep on working alone. If I need to import extra labour like feeding The Guard Llama, I will source that labour from within my household.  
• When outside help comes to the farm, like for sheering the sheep, we implement a 6-yard policy: no one is to go within 6-yards of the non-household-human.  It is essential to keep the people who care for our animals healthy and not endanger them in any way even if we probably don't have the virus.
• I panic bought handsoap, disinfectant, and even hand-sanitizer from a local company made from locally distilled alcohol.  And now I have to use it up so I'm doing far more cleaning than I ever wanted to.
• I am now ordering our beer online from the local brewery (and if you ever want to purchase some for me, ESB is my favourite!  Just say it's for Raven, they know who I am.). 
• I am no longer doing pickup and drop off orders until further notice.  Mail order only.
• To that end, I have released Tommy, the Attack Llama and his supporting troops, The Geese, to prevent unscheduled visitors from entering the property.  
• Reduced trips to the post office to no more than twice a week. 
• Sanitize my hands before and after being in the post office and after going anywhere humans might go.  Who am I kidding?  I'm washing my hands every half hour during the day because it gives me some measure of comfort and the illusion that I have control over the situation.

In every handful of soil, sleeps thousands of enemies; The seeds of weeds that, given the slightest moment of inattention, will gleefully smother all your hard work.  But what if there was a way to turn your enemies superpower against them?

A weed is just a plant that is growing unrequested.  And the thing about weeds is that they are just so good at growing.  They outgrow and smother just about any domestic plant.  The weeds have the advantage, they have been growing and reproducing in this garden for generations.  Through natural selection, the weeds have adapted to thrive in these conditions — clever little fellas.

​As the weeds grow and reproduce, they create a seed bank in the soil.   This is like a savings account of weed seeds that they can draw upon for future generations.  Some seeds will stay dormant for over 100 years, waiting for their moment.  No matter how many weeds we kill this year, there are always more seeds in the savings account.

We can fight this seed bank with chickens, chemicals, fire, heat, cold, all sorts of things - but weeds are tricky and have evolved over the years to survive all of these torments.  Let's face it, weeds are smarter than us and always will be.

It's time to start playing the weeds' game - And Win!​

I want to know the best way to ship carded wool batts so that the fibres stay lofty and easy to draft.  So I did some experiments.

A batt is the result of preparing the fibre on a drum carder.  It can be a giant drum carder like they have in a fibre mill, or a tiny one like mine.  Not that I mind tiny.  To me, it's just the right amount for what I'm doing now and I'm hoping my carding adventures will earn my way towards a bigger, better, bolder machine.  

To be brutally honest, I never paid much attention to my Etsy shop.  It's there if people buy stuff, that's cool.  I might go through a phase once or twice a year where I take more photos and list stuff, but over the last 13 years, the number of hours I've put into improving my shop is pitiful.  Until this year, most of my sales have been wholesale, but with the uncertainty ahead and being stuck at home on the farm, I finally had the time and the need to increase my Etsy sales.

​My favourite yarn to spin and most popular in the shops are something I call Singles Boucle. I learned this technique from the book The Intentional Spinner, and it's one of the most popular yarns to sell at the local shop.  It's also one of my favourite yarns to spin as it requires minimal fibre prep and is like combining pying and spinning all in one action.  

For this tutorial, I borrowed an e-Spinner Super Jumbo.  Lat's face it, I'm not much of an e-Anything, but having a wheel with huge bobbins, massive yarn guides and orifice, and can spin at a quick speed!  This e-Spinner Super Jumbo is tailor made for spinning this kind of yarn.

​As social distancing restrictions ease in my province, I can't help but worry our personal social distancing is just at the beginning.  Living with a family member who is immune suppressed and having several co-mobility factors myself, I suspect it will be months if not years before we can re-join society.  But it's not too bad with five acres and a house full of introverts.  We've been keeping busy.

​One of the things I set out to learn during lockdown is dyeing with acid dyes.  I bought a couple of kits from Ashford where 10g of dye is enough to colour 1-kilo of fibre!  With two years of fibre saved up for the local mill, which closed its doors last fall :( , I have a lot of wool (and alpaca, and llama, and silk, and...) to practice on.  It's been a massive amount of fun, and I feel I'm only just scratching the surface of what is possible with this fantastic art.