The Challenge Ride

The comments on the fellow I met on his ride to California reminded me of a personal best story in my repertoire.  Not my story, my daughter Beth’s.  She was born in 65, so would have graduated high school in 83, except she skipped the last year, so she graduated in 82.  (How I seem to calculate time any more.)  This would have been the summer of 83, when she was home briefly from college.  She didn’t come home often, even the semester she wasn’t in school, but there she was, home.

A bike challenge was to be held the following weekend, sponsored by the Y, where she had worked the summer before college.  She said she wanted to do it and I recommended she make some practice rides over the week to get in shape.  She hadn’t been on a bike since the previous summer, when she rode her bike to her Y job every day, a twenty mile round trip.

Come the Saturday, as we loaded the bike in the car, I realized there was precious little evidence of her practice riding the previous week.  I doubted the bike even moved over the course of the week.  I inquired and got the usual “I’ll be fine, Mom.”

I drove her up to the mall parking lot, the starting point for the twenty mile ride.  I remember having one hand on the hatch and one on her bike, staring around.  What was she getting into?  Teen agers and young adults all over the lot, dressed in whatever Speedo’s were in 1983.  Water bottles in holders on the bike frames.  Toe straps on the bike pedals.  I looked at my daughter in blue jeans and a T-shirt, her old ten speed with tires probably not up to pressure.  I felt in my pockets and didn’t even have a quarter to give her for a phone call if she broke down.  “I’ll be fine, Ma. Come back at 3 o’clock to pick me up.”

I circulated among  other parents and learned the course was through Little Mountain and the river gorge area north and west of the city.  That would be one hilly challenge.  I went home and watched the clock for the next three hours, until I could go back to the mall and see what I would see.

Out in the garage I pushed the button to lift the door and was greeted by the sight of Beth, making the turn up the hill into the drive.  She’d finished third in her class and was tired of waiting around for her ride home.

Easy Rider

The wren, the wren, the king of all birds...

I spent the afternoon hefting cameras and counting buttons.  I settled on another small point and shoot, a Nikkon S6300 Coolpix.  We’re still getting to know each other.  I can tell you this much:  the battery ain’t held in by no stinkin’ flimsy orange tab.  Take that, Kodak.  And, the old card is the new camera.

I spent the rest of the afternoon charging the battery.  It’s still charging—needs three and a half hours!  But, when I thought it had a picture or two in it, we went outside, and found wrens!

You may have noticed two wren houses in the oak tree.  I think the hammock crew came from the brown house. 

I thought the white house was empty.

Then I saw a cautious little wren in among the tattered ribbons on top of the bird house.

Doing her job.

Do you know the wren song?  Perhaps if you’re Irish or like folk lyrics. I don’t know if Wren Day is still practiced.  Like Trick or Treat.  I’m sure real wrens aren’t used, now.  The little captured wren hopefully died of fright sooner than later, and would have been easier to parade about in this children’s begging event.  Although, I believe, adults used the collected pennies to stage a party, before it became a children’s event.

The Wren Song

The wren, the wren, the king of all birds

St. Stephen's Day was caught in the firs

Although he was little, his honor was great

Jump up me lads and give us a treat

We followed the wren three miles or more

Three miles of more, three miles or more

Through hedges and ditches and heaps of snow

At six o'clock in the morning

Rolley, Rolley, where is your nest?

It's in the bush that I love best

It's in the bush, the holly tree

Where all the boys do follow me

As I went out to hunt and all

I met a wren upon the wall

Up with me wattle and gave him a fall

And brought him here to show you all

I have a little box under me arm

A tuppence or penny will do it no harm

For we are the boys who came your way

To bring in the wren on St. Stephen's Day

The wheels fell off

I came home from work around noon, put the car in the garage and came up the steps to the front walk.  Mama Wren was in my face the entire way, and when I reached the sidewalk, a house full of babies had turned out and were on the hammock. 

I sidled up the sidewalk, snuck in the house for my camera, snuck back across the yard and was eyeball to eyeball with a little guy sitting on the edge of the hammock.

“Hello,” he said.  That was hee-hee-hee-hee, but I translated it.

I pushed the power button.  Nothing.  Hee-hee-hee-hee.

I cursed softly and went back for Jan’s camera.

Back outside I found Laura in the hammock and no sign of birds.  Oh, well, it belongs to everyone.

Empty nest syndrome?



I'm leaving this sorry son of a buck at the camera store.  Maybe we can reuse the the card and the battery.  Certainly won't be transferring the wheels.

I’m off to Dodd Camera.  I want the best pictures with the fewest bells and whistles. 

The Ringer

 I’ve knit for most of my life, and eventually realized I needed to make yarn, too.  Sourcing a spinning wheel in the pre-internet early eighties involved a good deal of asking, and eventually my younger daughter Shelly brought home a card she picked up at a festival in Kirtland, Ohio.  It was for a spinning and weaving shop down in Chagrin Falls, tucked away in a nice enough alley.

The owner of the shop was very knowledgeable, but couldn’t read my mind or my future, and in my ignorance I left the shop with a double drive band Saxony wheel with the most tichy mother-of-all ever.  I spent more than a year teaching myself to spin on that wheel, and really didn’t become a good spinner until I bought a chair style wheel from a local craftsman.  His wife spun; he watched her and figured out how to do it better.

Of course, one thing leads to another.  If you spin you may learn to weave.  You’ll probably find a guild to join and then you learn a lot faster.  Pretty soon you’re caught up in the whole thing—washing fleece.  Dying fleece.  Carding fleece.  Signing on with your fellow guild members to be a team in a Sheep-to-Shawl contest.

A sheep-to-shawl contest is a juried competition of several teams of spinners and weavers, generally held in a fair or festival context, offering a cash prize to the team that spins and weaves a shawl, washes and dries it and presents the shawl for judging according to the stated rules.  Beside judging at the end, the end, the judges walk around observing warping, weaving and spinning technique.  It can be a long three hours.

Along with some other local guilds, ours sent a team to a local contest.  We began gathering about nine in the morning, getting space assignments, setting up looms, leveling spinning wheels.  Then two out of county trucks pulled in and another loom was unloaded, together with three more wheels, and assigned a spot.  A local judge whispered to one of our more experienced members and the word spread quickly.  The Washington Court House team!  Four hours south.  They got up mighty early in the morning!

I was the weaver that year and Jan was one of the team of three spinners who produced the yarn I wove.  I wove to the end of my warp, we set about the finishing, turned it in and waited.  When we got the results, our weaving was good, our spinning was good, our shawl was judged short of the required length.  The team from Washington Court House took home the money.

Undeterred, our guild put together two teams for a contest the next year.  Jan would be the weaver on our team, and we made at least one practice shawl.  Then, with days to the contest, one of our spinners had to drop out.  Fielding two teams meant our guild didn’t have a reserve spinner to make up the required team of three spinners and one weaver.  The two of us left spinning knew output was not the problem; the two of us could keep up with Jan.  We needed a ringer.

Shelly was in the tenth or eleventh grade then.  Heck, she could have been in first grade as long as she passed as a spinner.  I broke the news as soon as she was home from school.  You’re going to be a ringer in the Sheep to Shawl contest Saturday.

The only wheel I had for her was my double drive band impossible to tension mother-of-all Saxony wheel.  I didn’t tell her all that, I just told her she had to make it look like she could spin.  By the day after tomorrow.

Shelly did nothing on faith.  She had to question everything.  Understand everything.  Analyze everything.  Eventually I grabbed my car keys and told her I would be home when she passed for a spinner.  I came home from my girlfriend’s house, hours later, and found her taking off a bobbin of nicely spun yarn.  My ringer was the real deal.

At the Sheep to Shawl contest our guild’s teams took first and second places.  Washington Court House was disqualified.  They thought they had tipped the scale by appearing with a painted warp.  But the other teams protested the violation of the plain wool warp and they were disqualified.  Shelly’s bobbins of wool went right into that shawl, along with mine and the other spinner’s. 

I was so pleased with her skill and effort that after the event I offered her to buy her a wheel.

“No thanks, Mom.  I got my ribbon.  That’s all I wanted.” 

The Ringer

A Saxony wheel.  Image borrowed from the Michigan Fiber Arts Guild.  The drive band is twice as long as seen, and doubled.  One  strand of the band rides along each side of the wheel.  The other end of the drive band does two jobs.  One side drives the flyer that holds the bobbin and the other side drives the bobbin.  The entire assembly, two uprights with the bobbin between, rides in a groove and is connected by a screw thread on the knob in front.  This assembly is called the mother-of-all, and must be tensioned properly in order to make wool spin to yarn and take up on the bobbin.  Wooden screw threads don't lend themselves to fine tensioning.

Monday sunflower--another three inches

June 11

June 4

May 29