When planning our 4th trip to Ireland, the thing we most wanted to do was fly hawks. We had read Helen Macdonald’s astonishingly moving book about training and flying a goshawk, one of the most challenging of the raptors. It helped her grieve the death of her beloved father. The Financial Times calls H is for Hawk “… a dazzling piece of work: deeply affecting, utterly fascinating and blazing with love and intelligence” in their excellent review. 

I had recently lost people myself, my mother, my brother, a good friend, and the suffering that Macdonald so eloquently and painfully wrote about spoke to me. She learned about loss, death, and herself while training Mabel, her goshawk.  For me, flying a hawk seemed like a small way to touch what Macdonald learned and have a rare opportunity to look wildness in the eye.

Continue reading “On St. Patricks Day – I Wish I Were Flying Hawks in Ireland and Visiting Hedgehog Fibres”

I love wooden knitters’ tools. I suppose it makes perfect sense that someone with a site called Knits From the Woodlot should be as enamoured of wooden tools as I am. The photo above shows my newest acquisition, a wooden swift from ChiaoGoo. It has the qualities that I value in knitting tools – graceful lines, touchable surface, quiet and smooth working order, functional.

Continue reading “7 Reasons to Love Wooden Knitter’s Tools”

I teach a class about fibres, all kinds of fibres – what’s good about each of them for us as fibre folk – and what isn’t. Here’s something I just learned about rayon. The production of rayon and viscose fibre for the fashion industry is responsible for the destruction of 120 million trees annually, an increase of 70% over 5 years ago. So much for thinking that a renewable resource, fibre from cellulose, was a good thing.

The issue of deforestation is particularly acute in Indonesia and in the redwood forests of Canada and the United States, where old-growth forests are logged for wood pulp used for fabric.

Continue reading “What’s Rayon? What’s Wrong With It?”