In honour of Wovember - and Wool

Kate Davies and Felicity Ford have started a campaign to honour the wonder of pure wool - and to try to prevent advertizers from naming things which have NO WOOL at all - or a very little bit (like 5%) as wool. Repeat the mantra: Only wool is wool, and wool comes from sheep.
I have two stories to contribute. I grew up in a knitting home. My mum was a knitter, and so was her mom. They knit very fast - I know that they held their knitting differently than I do, and I know that, had I learned this properly, I would knit more quickly. Be that as it may. It's too late now.
We had (still have) a local woollen mill - MacAuslands - where materials for home knitting were sourced. They also produced (and still produce) the 100% wool blankets we slept under, and under which we - and our children - sleep every night.

In addition to knitting for our family, my mum would knit mittens and socks for her lobster-fisher brothers. They knew the value of the warm-when-wet properties of wool. I remember, as a child, being amazed at the huge size of the mittens she produced for the fishers - and commenting on it. She explained that she was allowing for shrinkage. In a very short time these mittens would be fulled by water - and warm hands, and work - to a windproof, warm, individually fitting, enclosure for hands.

When I was older, I used to go out on the boat - once each spring - to watch the process, and I saw these mittens in action. They would be drenched in salt water - dripping - but would keep hands warm and flexible as they hauled traps, opened doors and pulled lobsters out of the "parlour", and then added pieces of the bait - usually rotten-looking salt herring - to the bait spike. Then the door would be closed, the trap would be lined up with its fellows on the washboard, and, when all was ready, be pushed off again by mittened hands, to lie in wait for the next lot of lobsters. Amazing that all these jobs could be done by hands encased in mittens! And I'll bet that their hands were warmer than they are in the stiff waterproof gloves they use now. 
Mittens were even worn for the more dainty jobs - like "sizing", or measuring the lobsters - the "markets" for the restaurant trade, the "canners" for the factory, and the "Michauds" (named for the Fisheries Minister who brought in minimum lobster size regulations) to be flung back into the ocean for further growth. I don't think the mittens were thick enough to prevent hands from being "nipped" by the lobster's claws. My uncles treated the lobsters with respect for the danger, and held them carefully.
Wool from MacAuslands came in natural colours - off white and light, medium and dark grey. But mittens and socks for fishers had to be white. Grey was bad luck - and when you make your living on the sea, you need all the luck you can get.

My other wool story comes from 2010, on a trip to Ireland in April. We saw sheep everywhere - wild on the hills and roads in Connemara, in fields in Galway, Clare and Cork - with their tiny, beautiful, lively lambs. I wanted so much to photograph them, but discovered that, in Ireland, scenic lookoffs or even places to pull over are few and far between - and rarely do they take account of people wanting to photograph sheep. So I have quite a few blurry photos taken from the moving Mac Dubh (our rental car) and a few shots from when we were walking past a sheep pasture. Then, on our very last day with the car, en route from Galway to Dublin, we saw a pasture with a stopping spot, and I finally got a chance to take my photos. Voila: the sheep and lambs of Ballinasloe.
I did manage to buy some real knitting wool, Donegal tweed, from Ireland, in a shop in Clifden. The ultimate souvenir.
Happy Wovember. Happy knitting with wool.

Time's Marching On and Evita's coming soon!

...but the weather continues dreadful. Minus 14 this morning, and once again the car was reluctant to start - and go - and I was full of fellow-feeling. At least the sun is shining, and the house is always warm when we get home - thanks to those westward-facing windows.

So, all the excitement of March is approaching - St. Pat's of course, with several opportunities for dancing and playing music. There's a parade, too, but it's held on Sunday. We don't usually go, as it ends at St. Dunstan's for Mass. Not exactly non-denominational. And Evita is on at the end of March - the 26, 27 and 28 (She's above there, with Peron, in her "ugly pyjamas"). I picked up tickets yesterday for Fred, he wants to go on Saturday night (as well as Thursday) and there were very few tickets left. Looks like full houses!

And of course March Break! Doesn't mean as much when there aren't any children to plan trips with, but it's still a change in the daily fabric, and usually we can plan - or hope - for an improvement in the weather, once the traditional St. Pat's/March Break snowstorm is over.

I've been having fun with word-play books lately. Cat's Eye Corner is a kids' book, one I would have loved when I was one. I've been reading Percy Jackson books too, but finding them a bit - juvenile and talk-down (I'm reading them because my sister's working on the film version).

And on the adult front, The Stories of English. It's a survey of where the amazing variety comes from in the language, and gives much more credence than is usual to regional dialects (I find myself discussing this a bit with tutors who are determined to eliminate such from the vocabularies of people who have been speaking this way for 50 years!).

I've been knitting too - but also frogging. I made a sock that was just un-wearable, and decided to take it back and re-use the yarn for something else. I got a big batch of Briggs & LIttle yarn and am making Fred a new winter scarf 'n' hat set using the Palindrome pattern - amazing designer figured out how to have cables on both sides. I am also hoping that determinedly continuing with the wool knitting will fool the weather into thinking I actually LIKE all this wintry continuation. But we know differently, don't we?