A Recipe for Carpal Tunnel

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

—ARTHUR C. CLARKE

 

 

 

 

I decide I should attempt to go through the entire fiber process, fleece to yarn, all by myself. Why? I wish I knew.

So I soak a fleece in the washing machine, then spin out the water. I lay it outside in the sun to dry. The result is six paper grocery bags overflowing with fleece. Then I buy myself a pair of carders and begin the scritch-scritch-scratch of carding. My wrists hurt but I keep going, determined to take one of our sheep’s fleece all the way through to a finished product. I card while I watch DVDs. After a few months, I’ve barely made a dent in the six grocery bags, and my wrists still hurt. This may take longer than I thought. But when I finish carding, then I can spin the yarn, and then I can knit it.

My knitting has advanced to the point where I can now start and end the project myself, and feel very clever in doing so. When my aunt and uncle visit, I discover that my aunt knits as well, so I begin ranting about wool yarn, thinking we’ll share a knitting bond. My dear aunt smiles ruefully. “I only knit with acrylic. It’s cheaper than wool.”

The world crashes around my ears. I love this woman. She was raised on that sheep ranch with my mom. She has several degrees in home economics. She’s environmentally conscious. Yet she knits with acrylic yarn. Plastic yarn. A sacrilege.

I give my aunt a dressing-down for knitting with acrylic instead of wool, especially since I know she can afford wool. Then I begin sneering at friends’ Polartec jackets. At one writing retreat, I look around the room. Of the fourteen women there, half are wearing polar fleece. I’m so frustrated. Why isn’t everyone wearing wool? Converts are the most zealous, whether it’s smoking, or drinking, or being enthusiastic about wool.

Eventually I realize that I’m turning into a fabric Nazi, judging people because they aren’t avoiding plastic clothing. I myself own two polar fleece jackets, but I don’t wear them in public. They are a dark secret hidden in my closet.

Wendell Berry helps me see reason in his essay “Getting Along with Nature.” He wrote that while there may be two sides to a conflict, neither are absolutely right, nor should they be. He wrote of the conflict between coyotes and sheep:

The coyote-defenders may find it easy to forget that the sheep ranchers are human beings with some authentic complaints against coyotes, and the sheep-defenders find it easy to sound as if they advocate the total eradication of both coyotes and conservationists. ... The fact is that people need both coyotes and sheep.... This sort of conflict, then, does not suggest the possibility of victory so much as it suggests the possibility of a compromise—some kind of peace, even an alliance, between the domestic and the wild.

Sigh. The same might be true of wool and plastic clothing.

As I card and card and card, I learn that a distant cousin in Montana has recently begun operating a small fiber mill. Perhaps I should send some business her way. I pack more fleece into five black plastic bags and ask my visiting aunt and uncle to drop them at the fiber mill when they return to Montana.

Meanwhile, I continue to card my six grocery bags full of fleece. After a few more months, the sound of the wire teeth on my carding combs rasping, rasping, rasping against each other is rasping my brain to shreds. I cannot card one more micron of fleece. Screw the idea of doing it all by hand. How insane.

Time to move from the “totally by hand” method to the “partially by hand” method. I pack up my grocery bags, call my friend Kathy for moral and carding support, and meet her at the Weavers Guild, where, as a member, I can use the drum carders.

A drum carder sits on a table. It’s a wooden frame that holds a tray, a smallish cylinder covered in nasty little wires, and a large cylinder covered in the same stuff. Fluff up a handful of fleece, place it on the tray, then start turning the hand crank. Move the fleece forward until the little cylinder snags the fleece and feeds it onto the big cylinder. Do this a few times and soon the big cylinder is covered with fluffy, carded roving. Magic. This machine, advanced technology compared to my hand carders, is powered only by human muscle.

As I set up the drum carders, I feel a little guilty, as if I’m somehow cheating by taking this shortcut. I doubt my colonial ancestors had drum carders. Kathy shows up and we begin. We talk and crank and create fluffy batts that are about ten inches wide by eighteen inches long.

It’s hard work standing there all day, but having a friend help makes all the difference in the world. It doesn’t occur to me until later but we are doing exactly what women have done for ages—being productive with our hands while catching up with each others’ lives, telling stories, and making each other laugh. These are benefits of do-it-yourself that I can’t get from buying a sweater in the department store. After three hours of carding (six “woman” hours), we’re done. Shortcuts totally rule.

Now that the carding is done, I can freely spin. I spin while my tea is steeping. I spin while waiting for Melissa. I spin before I go to bed at night. It’s oddly relaxing and stress reducing, and I love seeing those bobbins fill up with yarn from our sheep. It seems that I’ve moved beyond the martyr Saint Catherine’s fate. The spinning wheel isn’t the instrument of my destruction, but of something much different.