Hand-crafted Homestead

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Our cellar is full of homegrown and locally grown foods: We have our own tomatoes, pickles, shell beans and much more. Jars of maple syrup from our sugar bush and honey from several beehives provide most of the sweeteners we use year-round. We are also lucky enough to live in a fruit-producing state, so we have both wild and cultivated blueberries, and we buy apples, peaches and pears from other area farms. The root cellar is filled with potatoes, and onion and garlic bags hang from the basement ceiling. We have meat from poultry and livestock raised here on the farm, which includes chickens and a few beef cows and calves. We also keep a Jersey cow, which provides milk for our butter and cheese, two border collies to help us manage the flock, and two house cats to keep us company.

Learning from Tradition

From Sheep To Rug

The choices we have made over the years have gradually, but steadily, led us to pursue learning the “old ways,” which usually means trying to master handwork. Technology has its place, but, if technology fails, as it sometimes does, it is comforting to know we can get along just fine with low-tech alternatives from our history.

In Sweden, in 1971, I learned to spin wool into yarn on an old spinning wheel. My teacher was Anna Alexandersson, my father’s first cousin. She was a kind taskmistress, but she settled for nothing less than perfection in the yarn I made. Her insistence upon quality work has been the standard against which I have measured all kinds of hand labor since that time.

It is easiest to see how far we have progressed in our adoption of the old handcrafts by looking at our wool rug production processes. We make and sell these rugs from home and at several shops. They are almost entirely made here on our farm: The only concession to factory work is in spinning the rug warp. I cannot produce the amount of warp I need on my spinning wheel and still have time to weave rugs, so we send some of our wool to a mill in New England and have it made into strong yarn.

When I tell children how a rug is made, I always say, “We begin by feeding the sheep and lambs,” for, of course, without a healthy flock there will be no good wool.

A few years ago, Runo had the opportunity to attend a one-day workshop on hand shearing taught by Kevin Ford, a master blade-shearer from Massachusetts. For years, Runo had shorn our flock with a motor-driven, fixed-shaft shearing machine, but in keeping with our interest in the old crafts, he attended this class out of curiosity. He was so impressed with Ford’s methods that he came home, sheared a couple of lambs we had in the barn and began reading Ford’s book, Shearing Day, night after night all winter long. When shearing time came around in March, Runo sheared our flock using only hand blades, and he continues to do the shearing this way.

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