Butternut Woolens

Boy A has been asking for a hooked rug in the shape of the United States, so we're going to work on it together as a family.

First, we decided to base our rug on the work of artists Rand and McNally.

We traced it onto white butcher paper, then onto Pellon, a synthetic paper-like fabric, a few dollars at Joanns.

I use linen for my hooked rugs. It's a little more expensive than burlap, but I really like how its fluidity affects the finished piece and it's much more durable. I buy my linen from Judy at Little House Rugs.

I put the Pellon drawing over the linen and trace with a marker. The marker ink bleeds through the Pellon. Remove the Pellon and re-trace if you need to make the lines more visible.

You'll notice a couple of crop marks in the corners on the left. I don't draw in the border on the Pellon, but make 2 crop marks and draw the border(s) directly on the linen by following a single thread. This assures a straight finished border.

We chose Lamb's Pride Bulky from Woodland Woolworks. I've never worked with this yarn, but I've heard it holds up well to wear even though it's a single ply. I'm hoping the 15% mohair is going to help it hold up to a couple of little guys. The mohair gives the yarn a soft sheen.

Can't wait to get started.

So you all know by now that I'm living a different life now than I'd ever imagined. Some days it sucks. I'm reminded of Arlo Guthrie, who I have a secret crush on because I love his music and because he has hair like a Lincoln sheep. I LOVE his hair. I could roll around in his hair.

Uh.....

Where was I?

Anyway, Arlo said, "If the world was great, there was no suffering, no disease, everyone had a nice car and everything, you'd have to go a long way out of your way to make a difference in this world, but in a world that sucks, like this one, you don't have to do hardly nothing at all to make a better place."

And something I've figured out? There's not a wool's breadth difference between the two, between suckiness and OKness. It's all in how you look at it.

Today our local newspaper ran a story about the release of the Oregon Food Bank's annual report. Not surprisingly, the number of people using emergency foodboxes has gone up drastically, as much as 30% in some rural areas of Oregon, most of those people are children. Someone using the moniker Downtown Elite posted in the comments to that story that the hungry were freeloaders and should come clean his condo in Portland's Pearl District to earn their food. We've all seen this attitude before, I'm sure, the poor deserve to be poor because they are (fill in the blank). Lazy. Addicts. Stupid. Have too many children. Gaming the system, etc.

Several years ago I took some of my apple harvest and organic sweet corn from my farmer neighbor to a women's shelter in downtown Portland. I wrote about that experience in Feeding the Spirit. I had thought women in homeless shelters were women, who for whatever reasons, had made poor choices about the men in their lives. That they were just a little bit culpable for their situations. I'm a feminist, so don't beat me up about this, but I honestly thought that the women in homeless shelters were kind of stupid about men and probably were not very educated and probably didn't brush their teeth twice a day and let their children run wild, and didn't use birth control what-in-the-hell-were-they thinking?

I brought the food into the shelter's kitchen and the director asked me to step into her office. She told me that women end up at the shelter for various reasons, some were overcoming addictions, some had full time jobs, but didn't have enough money to afford housing, some had fallen on hard times, yadda, yadda. I nodded sympathetically. I'm a sympathetic person, not an elitist. I come from Montana, for God's sake, a rural state that breeds self-reliance and down-home populism. The red counties are red because of all the NEW people moving there. I like to say that my people have been Democrats since before there WERE Democrats. And I like to tell the story about how the game warden in West Yellowstone would look the other way until the widowed and divorced women had been supplied with meat. I swear to God the first question people ask my brother at family gatherings, like the memorial service for my grandmother, is "Have you got chure elk yet?" Even my portly, divorced, past middle aged auntie gets her elk, and she's no hunter, believe me.

There was a time when my brother was in a tough situation when his boys were little. He had a strategy though. "I need an elk and 4 antelope, or a buck and 2 does and an antelope, or a moose, but I probably won't get a permit for that...." To this day my nephews prefer game to beef. They think prime Montana beef tastes funny. They might be onto something, the middle boy won the Boogie to the Bank 5K race this year in his age division and the youngest beat everyone but his brother. He's in 8th grade. Both of them ran the equivalent of 5 minute miles for just over 3 miles. It's all that wild meat in their muscles, I'm sure. They're half elk.

There was only one woman signed up for my cooking class at the shelter, the director was apologetic, but I shrugged and started peeling apples. Women came into the kithen, "Whatchu makin?" "Cooked apples. Corn for freezing for later. Would you like to shuck one of these?"

Some of the women had never shucked fresh corn and others who knew how showed them. One woman told me my apples had 'bitter pit', a calcium deficiency (I would find out later that she was probably right). A Native American woman was delighted to learn I was from Montana. She smiled and talked about her home. I had been to the Bighorn Valley on the Crow Reservation, which is among some of the prettiest country there is. We both loved the cottonwoods along the river in the fall. My hairdresser in Bozeman was a Crow medicine man, from her people. Her face had been so disfigured from abuse it was no longer symmetrical.

After we cooked, we went out into the shelter's garden. We were trying to identify a strange looking viney kind of plant. A quiet woman in a pink sweater gave us the Latin name. You could have knocked me over with a Crow eagle feather at that point. "How do you know Latin?" "Oh, I picked it up here and there." I learned later that she had come to the shelter because medical bills had forced her to sell her home. So much for my theory that educated people weren't homeless.

I can only imagine the chuckling that must have been going on in heaven this summer when, because our farm sold so quickly with such a short closing time, I was, technically, homeless for 4 weeks. The first week I spent at the Kalama Horse Camp on the side of Mt. St. Helens, lying on the picnic table watching the clouds and thinking, "What in the hell just happened...." The next 3 weeks the boys and I were "camping", at least that's what I called it. We played in the John Day River, we looked for fossils, we admired old barns and wondered about rattlesnakes. We found a campsite each night, without a map, just trusting that something would turn up. I hope I gave them the experience of trusting Life, that something you need will turn up because you are loved by Life itself, that you are good at your core and that goodness will somehow be rewarded enough to enable you to live. If I die tomorrow, I go peacefully, because I taught my boys not to fear living, the most important lesson of all.

So I commented to ole Downtown Elitist, and I reminded him that one year ago today my husband and I were making $100K+, had a small mortgage, cars paid off, no significant debt. And last week I started cleaning houses. That he shouldn't LOL too loudly, Life has a way of bringing us home, and I couldn't be happier.

My prayers to all of you facing tough times right now. Don't despair, get creative, keep hope. It could all look different in the morning. And those of you choosing restful homes right now? Thank you. I'll see you next week, in my yellow overalls and pink rubber gloves.

PS. There's still 6 skeins of hand-dyed yarn in the armoire..:)

The boys and I headed out early Saturday for a fun day at the Oregon Flock and Fiber Festival, it was a beautiful sunny day. And what a show! The place was packed. I had saved a bit of money and was hoping to find a little goodie for myself; maybe a skein of cashmere, maybe a little sheep or rabbit art work for the house.

I loved the gallery, so many exquisite woolens and then suddenly I was overwhelmed with grief. I stood in a corner by the huge paintbrush sculpture in the 4-H building with the boys and cried and couldn't stop. It's embarrassing, it's like a faucet is turned on in my head and I can't turn it off and I just hate it. We had to leave and by the time we walked back to the car I was able to compose myself. We had a bite to eat at the Biscuit Bakery and went home.

What causes this? Is it stress from my new life? Or grief over the old life that is no more? It sneaks up on me. Reading a newsletter that there's going to be a fall cleanup party at a local farm and unbidden I smell rotting apples and the horsey smell of Shetlands in the slanting fall sunshine and the next instant I'm crying my silent river, borne away.

I don't feel particularly depressed, I'm not without hope, there's still a spark of creativity inside me, fun ideas emerge now and then. I still can joke with the boys and write a bit of wit, and except for this unpredictable onset of grief, I think I'm doing pretty good, considering.

I guess I'm just not ready yet for fiber festivals. Or maybe I should try the desensitizing approach-rent a booth in the middle of it all and lay on the grass bawling until all the grief has been spent. I think my heart would explode.

Many years ago my friend Lori, a single mom, developed a habit so good I knew I had to try it. Whenever she was feeling unsettled or upset she'd clean. It became kind of compulsive, in the middle of a conversation she'd dash into the kitchen to wash a glass, you had to follow her around the house when you visited. Needless to say I jumped right on that bandwagon. The problem was I just didn't have enough tension in my life to really get going.

That problem's solved! And I'm looking for a broader audience.

I give you Farm Girl Housekeeping, a new kind of cleaning service. If you could give someone you loved a peaceful heart, a rest from their cares, wouldn't you do it? Isn't that the sentiment we express when we give away our knitting?

I love giving gifts that have nothing to do with money because I love my family and friends so much I'd prefer to give each of them everything I have. But I can't do that, so instead I try to give them something that is beyond price. I read somewhere that an economist calculated the value of a handknit shawl. Using commercially available yarn, a fairly intricate pattern if I remember correctly (beyond my skill level anyway) and a labor rate of minimum wage in 2005, the economic value of a handknit shawl came out to $6,000.

I want to give 8-32 knitters the gift of a restful home because a restful home can create a peaceful heart and a peaceful heart can create dozens of handknit shawls and who knows what all that living energy moving around could do?

Here's how it works: For $90-$240 per month, you get between 1 and 4 three hour intensive cleaning sessions. You come home to a sparkling kitchen, even the refrigerator has been cleared and tamed, the lettuce washed, the vegetables scrubbed and ready to use if you like. All of the floors have been mopped and vacuumed. The laundry has been done and lies neatly folded on your fresh bed. The bathrooms are perfect. And even the stuff you don't quite see, but can sense, has been done. Your home is now a restful space waiting to envelope you and support you in your life.

It's like being at the Madrona Fiber Arts Festival, except you don't have to drive to Tacoma. (and if your living room isn't stuffed to the ceiling with wool and knitters, which it so could be now that the house is clean.)

I've noticed that my boys bicker and pick on each other less when the house is tidy and filled with the smell of dinner cooking. I think they feel more cared for and thus more secure. I see Farm Girl Housekeeping as a vital service for families.

If you've never had your house professionally cleaned, why not give it a try? You might be surprised at what you can create in your life from a restful space.

I realize that in order to budget for your cleaning service some of you might have to dip into the yarn money, so for the first eight knitters that schedule a cleaning, I'll give a skein of Butternut Woolens hand-dyed yarn-y yumminess worth $20-$40.

What do I get? I get to have money of my own that hasn't been given to me resentfully under court order. Maybe enough money to buy a dining room table that is not a repurposed picnic table. I get to work off some anxiety, maybe enough to find peacefulness each evening. And, I get to enable creative energy to flow through the people I'm around, which is exactly what I was all about during those Butternut Woolens years anyway.

Questions? Visit www.farmgirlhousekeeping.squarespace.com. Ready to schedule? Email me at: shelly at farmgirlhousekeeping dot gmail do com or shelly at butternutwoolens dot com.

Peace friends,

Hi, I'm the Verizon Repair Representative. I'm here to provide you with excellent customer service. Uh, why is your driveway blocked by an enormous pile of tree branches?

Me: Three words White Man-- Fort Hall, Idaho.

Verizon: I don't get it.

Me: My grandfather was born in Fort Hall. Hand me that box of matches.