Last Night's Reflections

(posted from LAX airport, while enjoying my first meal in the US in eight and a half months. My choice? Nachos and Cherry Coke. God bless America.):

It's my last day in New Zealand. To be totally correct, it's the penultimate hour before my flight leaves for LA. I'm sitting at the window in the Auckland airport, eating mediocre bacon and egg pie (my other option was Burger King, and I am NOT having my last meal on New Zealand soil be American fast food! So Kiwi fast food it is), and people-watching both inside and outside the terminal. Outside, it's drizzling: the slow, insistent, methodical haze that I've become familiar with throughout the New Zealand winter. It never rains, exactly, but everything has this misty halo surrounding it, a perpetual ring around the moon. I have, at times, missed the snow, but I think I can handle this, too.



When I was walking from the domestic terminal to the international one, I spotted, out front of the baggage claim, the bench where I had sat eight and a half months ago, waiting for the bus into Auckland and terrified out of my mind. Eight months seemed to loom in front of me, vast and unfillable, overwhelmingly foreign in its enormity and emptiness. I had people that I had contacted, sure, and a vague idea of where I was going first, but I was, for the most part, rootless. In the past eight months, however, I have put down those tiny little "soul-roots" that Anne talks about in Anne of the Island, those little anchors that have made this voyage utterly unforgettable. Building faery houses with the kids at Mangarara, curling up in an armchair at Betty's and knitting companionably, going for Sunday drives with Barb and Stuart through the mountain passes. There are little bits of me in each of those places, and I couldn't be happier about it.

One of the things that has surprised me most about this trip are those connections, actually; one of my bad habits in life is experiencing the experience, and taking new self-knowledge and ideas away from it, and then, detaching. I am terrible at keeping in touch with people, I usually visit places once, and I let things finish within that bubble. But this time, there is an idea that my time in New Zealand is by no means over. I have made family here, and, as you might have guessed, I am absolutely, hedonistically, head-over-heels in love with the landscape and the lifestyle. I had thought, prior to visiting, that it would be an excursion, and that would be it. Back to normal life. But now I know better, and I am glad to be proven wrong.

I've been saying goodbye to the country in my own way. I left Tally Ho on Thursday and spent the night in Queenstown, and then flew up to spend my last few days in Wellington. I can unabashedly state that I love love love Wellington in winter; it's mellow and quiet, and a heck of a lot warmer than Central Otago. I spent a lot of time reading, eating out at little restaurants on Cuba Street, and (shamefully) shopping, but also had a lot of time to just wander around.

Since it's the off-season for Wellington, there aren't many tourists around, which makes life wonderfully calm. I went to Te Papa again on Monday morning, and had most of the exhibitions to myself--which meant I finally got to try all the interactive games that I couldn't ever get close to before! I also got to curl up and people-watch in the cafe for a couple hours, lazily nibbling on a brownie (couldn't finish it, mom, too chocolaty) and reading the newspaper. Today, I went up in the cable car to the Botanical Gardens, and got as deliberately lost as possible, forgetting the city noise and traffic in a deep gully of native bush. Everyone at the hostel last night was aghast that I was chilling out rather than cramming as much in my last days as possible, but for me? Not seeing it now is just another excuse to make sure I come back later on.

So we're now approaching my final hour in New Zealand. The airport's getting quiet; mine is one of the last flights to go before it shuts down until morning. I have a good book to start, and a bunch of movies on my laptop to wade through as needed. Or, which is most likely, I think I'll just spend my last hour watching the rain fall and continuing to think how incredibly lucky I am to have had this journey. I can only hope that the journey is just beginning!

Winter Days at Tally Ho

Blogging on dial-up! This is a chancy proposition! But I wanted to check in and give you guys a little glimpse of my life down here. I'm going to have to put my writing skills to the test, since uploading pictures on this internet connection would take longer than I'd like to imagine. So:

Waking up in the mornings here is always a little hard; the hot water bottle that I've gone to sleep snuggling has finally gone cold, and the sun isn't yet sufficiently over the hills to warm the frost from the windowpanes. Looking out my window, still wrapped in as many blankets as I can manage to drag off my bed, I can see the ducks walking unsteadily across the paper-thin layer of ice that's frozen on the pond overnight. Everything is crystalline and fragile; the dogs, wandering across the frozen grass, leave dark footprints against the pale silver. After the first cup of tea of the day, things look a little sunnier, and I head over to the woolshed to either help run the carding machine, or to the cowshed to wash wool prior to carding.
The sun gradually melts all but the most stubborn frost during the day, so that, when I wander up the hill to the chickens or to the foals, I still stumble across patches of crunchy, hard earth amongst the mud. But the best part of the day comes in the late afternoon, when the sun falls behind the far hill and we scramble to finish the afternoon chores before dark. The temperature dips immediately, but the sun stays shining on the mountain range to the east, turning the snow and shadows there into the most delicate shades of pale yellow and lavender. When afternoon chores are done and the fire is lit in the living room, I am armed with yet another cup of tea (probably my fifth or sixth of the day), and I curl up on the couch to knit and watch the sun fade gradually on the mountains. My life revolves around wool, tea, sunlight, and fire, and I'm not sure I would change much of anything.

In the absence of any real content. . .

Doom-digga-doom, digga-doom, digga-doom, PUPPY TIME!



I'm currently working 60-hour weeks at an apple-packing plant back in Central Otago, so Pip's puppies are about the most interesting thing going in my life right now!

(This is Ellie, who I am planning to smuggle back to the States. For reals.)

The apple season end in the middle to the end of May, and by then, I promise to have a life. And knitting and spinning content! Promise!

Oh, and P.S.

I forgot to add to the last post: since I'll be home in the coming fall, and therefore within driving distance and among interested parties, who's up for a roadtrip to Rhinebeck? =)

Mid-Term Report and Mountains of FOs

On the 17th of February, one of my last days at Fleecewood, I hit the halfway point on my time here in New Zealand. It all seems a bit unreal that I'm on the downward slope of my visit, and that it will only be three more months before I'm on that plane back home. But in the meantime, here's the rundown of my time here so far, interspersed with fibery eye candy so no one gets bored.

Places I've WWOOFed: 6, with two visits to Betty in Nelson
Miles traveled around New Zealand: about 2,200 so far, all by bus!
Times ferried across the Cook Strait between the North and the South Island: 4

(Diagonally woven cowl, using leftover Noro Silk Garden Sock yarn.)

Animals I've worked with: sheep, both baby and adult (lots and lots and lots of sheep), cows, goats baby and adult, ducks baby and adult, chickens baby and adult, horses, both full-sized and miniature, dogs, cats, alpacas, and children!

(felted cowl, nuno felted over woven remnants of sari fabric. Done at the Teapot Valley felting weekend.)

Most importantly, sheep and fiber breeds I've worked with: Romney, Suffolk, Perendale, Hokanui, Texel, Gotland, English Leicester, Fleecewood Leicester, NZ Halfbred, Karakul, huacaya alpaca, guanaco llama.

(wet-felted scarf inset with diagonal weaving pieces, woven from more leftover Noro Silk Garden sock yarn.)

Big life decisions made: 1. In the last week or so at Fleecewood, I had a rather big crisis of conscience as to whether my intended path after my return home, namely, a graduate program in anthropology with a focus on non-profits, was the right thing for me. After all the work I've been doing in the fiber community both at home and here in New Zealand, did I really want to put that on the back burner in order to pursue an academic background? Every time I thought about an impending move to Montreal, the location of my chosen grad program, my interests lay more in how to find a place in the fiber community there than in how I would start to fit back in to academia.

("Horizon Line", my favorite of my felted pieces from Teapot Valley. Wet-felted with inset diagonal weaving, and yarns on top ranging from wool boucle to op-shop mohair to my own handspun of the llama fiber I worked on last time I was at Betty's. These are the colors I see in New Zealand: deep, cornflower blue, steely slate grey, and burnished gold. And white sheep, of course!)

So one day at Fleecewood, I wandered up to the top paddock, the only place on the farm with cell phone reception, and spent an hour swatting away sandflies and talking with my parents about my life path. My time in New Zealand had given me so many ideas for where I could take a business in the fiber industry, and made me feel that it was not unrealistic that I could accomplish them. But if McGill said yes, then I would feel obliged to go. But even if I could come to a decision at this point, I wouldn't hear back from McGill for another couple weeks at least. So I had to sit on it and wait. Which I am really, really not good at.

(The last piece I felted during the weekend, when my brain was shot and I was tired of thinking of composition and color. I like to call this one "The Artwork on the Wall at the Motel 6 in Hoboken, Felted".)

So I gritted my teeth, and sat on it, and waited. I went to the felting weekend (which was amazing, by the way), and had some amazing conversations about marketing and distributing spinner's fleeces to the U.S market. I went back to Betty's, and spun my natural-dyed wool like a demon, and ate plums straight off the tree, practiced driving on the wrong side of the road, and watched lots of bad tv. One Saturday, I went downtown to check my e-mail and run errands, and there was a letter from McGill in my inbox. Basically, "thanks, but no thanks." Now, when I had, earlier in the year, imagined getting a rejection letter from them, I had planned gales of tears--this was my life plan! How dare they! But now, I looked at it, went "hmm," finished my tea, and went off the market.

(A shawl, pre-blocking and on the blocking board, handspun from some of Betty's alpaca and llama, blended with wool and silk, and knit from a lace pattern I designed a couple months ago.)

The next day, I called home again and spent about an hour and a half putting together business plans so that I can hit the ground running when I come home to Maine. Because, if there's one thing I've learned in my time down here, it's that I can travel all I want, but Maine will always be the place I have to come back to. It's too much in my blood now for me to stay away. So I'm coming back to Portland to stay, and to keep working in the fiber community. I've got my eye on a couple online master's programs, so that's not completely out of my plans, but I am so, so incredibly happy that I am able to pursue the career of my dreams in a place I love.

(Shawl, now named "Poecilasthena" after a native New Zealand moth, post-blocking. This stayed with Betty, as a thank you for taking such good care of me during my time there. She's made me promise to come back, and, as the rest of my time on this trip is booked, I guess I'll just have to start planning another trip down here!)

And now? I'm in Wellington for the weekend to see an Amanda Palmer concert and a Neil Gaiman talk. I'm off in twenty minutes to see Alice in Wonderland. On Sunday I fly back down to Central Otago to start up work at an apple-packing place while boarding at Tally Ho. Life is really, really good.

Oh, and you remember the fiber I worked on last time I was at Betty's? Pablo, the exquisite llama? It's been blended with wool and silk and spun by Beth, an 85-year-old woman who's been spinning for about twice as long as I've been alive. Take a look:

Oh, baby.

Fleecewood!

So after three days of all these exciting stops and lots and lots of windy mountain road through the bush, I was more than ready to settle down in one place for a while. I had met Anne, the proprietor of Fleecewood Farm, back in October at a Rural Women's Institute Natural Fiber Expo, where both she and Betty were vendors. I have to admit, my interest definitely rose from seeing her beautiful colored fleeces, most in a breed she's developed herself, called Fleecewood Leicester. It's a cross between an English Leicester and an NZ Halfbred, which is, in turn, a longwool/merino cross (like a Corriedale). This, in turn, leads to a crimpy, soft, and still lustrous fleece in some of the most gorgeous shades of brown and grey. The fleece I ended up with (because, c'mon, let's be serious here, of course I bought a fleece) is this light mocha-grey-brown color that first caught my eye at the Expo and that I've never really seen before. So I was more than happy to go explore the farm and flock!

One of the coolest things about Anne is that she's basically run this farm single-handedly for twenty years, doing all the maintenance and construction herself. Therefore, she didn't blink an eye at assigning me the really physical jobs that other WWOOF farms tend to save for male WWOOFers. So the first couple weeks of my stay, I worked in the paddocks, rebuilding the cold weather sheep shelters, whose original purpose were to contain car parts as they were shipped to New Zealand.

These shelters had first gone up twenty years previous, and hadn't had anything done since then. It was interesting, to say the least! Often, I got to play MacGyver while attempting to cobble together a structure that didn't put weight on the rusted-out bits, or avoided the predominant wind (which changed direction with every paddock), or didn't crowd the manuka tea trees. It was very hot, dirty, sweaty, and frustrating work at times, but you also couldn't beat the sense of accomplishment when all twenty shelters were finally back up and I knew I had done all of it with my own hands. And sure, they weren't the most level or plumb of structures, but I was really proud when I put my tools away for the final time.

Since I was in the paddocks the entire time I was working on these, the sheep on the farm also got used to me, and, in my last couple days there, I often went up to the paddocks in my spare time and just sat down in the grass and chilled out with them. Part of me knows that these sheep were conditioned to associate Human with Bringer of Food, but most of me knows it was also one of the coolest feelings ever to stand in the center of a paddock, the breeze taking away the bite of the sun's heat and drying the sweat on my skin, as about eighty ewes start moseying my way.

I also really love it when sheep are comfortable enough with you that they can turn their back on you:



I also went to visit the lambs to take pictures of my latest pair of knit socks, and had these two lovely helpers:

Don't they just look like they're going to get into some serious trouble?

Anyway, socks:

Noro Silk Garden Sock, two different colorways, four row stripes, my regular sock pattern. Can I just say how much I love Noro, even though the yarn itself is rather crap? These were knit in about a week, since I just wanted to keep seeing how the color would change next!


The final project I worked on at Fleecewood was washing fleeces for processing into batts, and then playing with lichen and onion skins in my first attempt at natural dyeing. What a hard life I lead, eh?


It was a grey, rainy day while I was dyeing these, and it was absolutely wonderful to sit comfortably in the garage, tucking my toes close to the gas rings to keep warm and occasionally stirring these incredibly aromatic pots of wool. After about an hour of simmering, we had:

The peachy-brown was dyed with lichen, with alum and cream of tartar mordant. The acid yellow was onion skins, mordanted with alum, cream of tartar, and ferrous sulfate. Anne and I split these, and I blended my lot together to get this heathery, old gold color that is screaming to be cabled mittens.

I just need to keep spinning it!

So from the sheep shelters, to the sheep themselves, to the fleeces and dyeing, I had a wonderful time at Fleecewood. Seeing Anne, a strong, single woman, doing this on her own, has made my little, farfetched dream of someday owning my own farm seem not that farfetched anymore. I feel like the possibilities are limitless, and I can't wait to keep exploring!

To say goodbye, I give you a quizzical Tweety the sheep and a sullen and rained-on Boy the goat, both of whom I got to know pretty well at Fleecewood. Both had leg injuries in the first week I was there, and so were confined to the race down by the shed so that Anne could keep an eye on them and treat them as needed. I would break branches off the tree lucerne for them whenever I would walk by, and Boy would often come nibble on my ear when I was trying to saw wood for the sheep shelter cross-braces. They always made my day!

Making my winding way back North

Hello all! Greetings from Nelson, where I am comfortably ensconced back at Betty's, the llama lady I stayed with way back in October and November. We've just wound down from an all-felting, all-the-time weekend up in a little place called Teapot Valley, and I finally found the chance to talk about my trip from the bottom of the South Island to the top, and then my time at my latest farm, a wonderful place called Fleecewood. So here we go!

I decided this time that, since I'd already traveled the East Coast of the South Island, it would be good to head up the West Coast to get back to Nelson. This is the least populated and most forested area of New Zealand, and so the twenty-two plus hours I spent on buses (spread over three days, thank goodness) was mostly shrouded in lush, tall greenery, with occasional glimpses like this:

and stops to see things like this:


Which, for the life of me, I can't remember the name of. I don't know if you've noticed so far, but I'm a pretty bad tourist. I tend to wander off the beaten path, both literally and figuratively, and instead of dutifully reading the info sign about the waterfall or trying to capture its enormity on camera with everyone else, I end up crouched in the bushes on a deer path, getting bitten ferociously by mosquitoes and taking pictures of random bits of river that had an interesting play on color and shadow and light.




So I'll be absolutely no help when you try and plan your own trip to New Zealand ("You need to go see that thing! In the place! With the other thing!"), but darnit if I don't have good adventures along the way.

One of the other places we stopped was the Pancake Rocks, about a kilometer of unusual rock formations on the coast.




One of the other cool things about this area was that the entire pathway around the Pancake Rocks is surrounded by harakeke, or New Zealand native flax.

I've so far been too intimidated by the native bush conservation efforts to filch a leaf off of this to process for spinning, but I might work up the courage soon. Harakeke is used a lot in Maori weaving, but it's used in strips about an inch wide, whereas I want to see if it will strip down and ret into linen. Stay tuned!

Okay, this is getting rather long, so I'd better split this into two blog posts. Stick around for what happened when I finally got off the bus and made it to Fleecewood, the next stop on my WWOOFing tour!