What’s a homeowner to do?
Super Sheep to the rescue. Melissa put up a temporary electric fence, then opened the big red gate and called the sheep. They leaped into the yard and scampered about, almost too excited to eat. There was even some actual sproinging. Apparently, the grass actually is greener on the other side.
The sheep mowed the grass down to golf course lushness, then Melissa took them out and moved them into the Bowl Pasture. The only sign the sheep did the work instead of the fuel-guzzling lawn mower were the small piles of Milk Dud–sized manure.
I may not recycle or compost consistently, but at least I raise sheep.
Now if I could just get over Elvis.
The Fuzzy Patriots
Patriotism is not short, frenzied outbursts of emotion, but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime.
—ADLAI E. STEVENSON
Sheep might be the most colorful animals on the planet. They’re green. They’re covered in white or black or brown fleece. And if you shear off that fleece, underneath you’ll find centuries of red, white, and blue.
Wool has kept U.S. soldiers warm in every war. Pioneers in Oregon built mills and made blankets for soldiers in the Civil War. One of the early Oregon mills is still there—Pendleton. During World War II we couldn’t produce enough wool to keep our troops in warm uniforms and blankets, so we had to import wool. The National Wool Act was created in 1954 to encourage farmers to produce more wool by giving them government subsidies. Today the largest buyer of U.S. wool is the U.S. military.
During the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, soldiers beat the heat by wearing polyester T-shirts designed to wick away moisture and keep them dry. Unfortunately, because it’s made from petroleum, you can’t get much more flammable than a synthetic T-shirt. Hidden IED explosives in Iraq have severely burned thousands of U.S. soldiers. Add a layer of melted plastic over those burns and you have horrific wounds.
A surgeon writes in an online issue of the Marine Corps News: “Burns can kill you and they’re horribly disfiguring. If you’re throwing melted synthetic material on top of a burn, basically you have a bad burn with a bunch of plastic melting into your skin and that’s not how you want to go home to your family.”
That’s why wool manufacturers worked with the military to design a fabric using wool’s natural fire-retardant properties. They made a blend of 50 percent wool and 50 percent aramid (a synthetic that’s more flame resistant than most). “The fabric feels like silk,” said Jeanette Cardamone, a researcher at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Ag Research Service (ARS) Eastern Regional Research Center in Wyndmoor, Pennsylvania. When they field-tested the shirts, they didn’t tell the troops they were wearing wool in case they’d automatically imagine the shirts itched.
A wool expert brought a handful of these shirts to our sheep producers’ meeting one year, and the fabric was light, soft, and amazing. We were all given the chance to buy one, even though we weren’t in the military. I looked at the pile of light tan shirts, colored to coordinate with desert camouflage. “Do you have anything in turquoise?” No. “Melting Mountain Stream?” Again, no. I declined to purchase one because tan isn’t my best color, which proves that I can be, on occasion, a total idiot.
Sheep not only do a great job of supporting our troops, but they also supported the American colonists. In the 1600s, British cloth was very expensive and the British put restrictions on what the colonists could and could not do when it came to wool textiles. Because colonists were producing their own wool and making their own textiles, they were buying less and less of England’s textiles, which was why England wanted colonies in the first place, as a ready market for their products.
So when those American upstarts continued developing their own wool clothing industry, England passed the 1699 Wool Act, declaring that “no person may export in ships or carry by horses” to anywhere outside their own colony “any wool or woolen manufactures.” If caught, the ship’s captain risked forfeiture of his ship and cargo, as well as paying a £500 fine. It’s been said that other punishments included chopping off the hand of someone caught transporting wool.
But our clever colonial shepherds got around this ban on transporting wool. Sheep have feet, so shepherds would walk their sheep to the textile mills, shear them there, then walk them home. Of course there was a ban on transporting wool textiles, but these were easier to smuggle than big bags of fleece.
The British couldn’t repress colonial patriots. It became a sign of patriotism to wear clothing made from American wool. Soon even fashionable people dressed in either homespun or linseywoolsey, a colonial mix of wool and linen or cotton. By 1763, the colonists were spinning like mad. It took about four colonial spinners to keep one weaver in yarn, which paints the picture of women being permanently attached to their spinning wheels, but still, those women were patriots.
The seed of self-sufficiency became firmly rooted in the American mind. George Washington, a sheep owner, continued this patriotic use of clothing. When he was inaugurated on April 3, 1789, he wore a suit manufactured in the new country of the United States by the Hartford Woolen Manufactory, described as “a fine, dark-brown woolen coat, waistcoat and breeches, which were worn with white silk stockings and shoes with silver buckles.” For his 1809 inauguration, President James Madison wore a suit of “domestic broadcloth,” woven from the wool of Vermont sheep. I wonder how long it’s been since an American president has worn a wool suit made in America to his inauguration.
This idea of Americans being so determined to be selfsufficient seems overly quaint, almost laughable now, given our devotion to globalization, but it makes me sad to think it’s something we may never see again. We’re supposed to blindly accept globalization as inevitable, yet I wonder what would happen if patriotism became something more than waving the flag or supporting the president no matter what he did or said, and instead became a way to improve people’s lives here, to support American industry, to really put our dollars where they mattered.
A few years ago sock-maker Wigwam Mills in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, decided to buy as much American wool as possible, not for patriotic reasons but for practical ones, since the company found that American wool’s tighter crimp created better resilience and insulation.
Goodhew Socks in Tennessee is in the process of converting part of its sock production to an “all-domestically sourced product.” This was apparently the theme of many conversations heard by wool consultants at a recent Outdoor Retailer Summer Show. Said one consultant in Sheep Industry News, “The demand for domestic products is growing. Everyone we talk to expresses strong desire to bring their products back to the United States and promote the fact that they are all domestic.”
George Washington would be proud.
The Queen of Do-It-Yourself
Hawkeye: Margaret, wasn’t this potholder supposed to be a scarf?
Margaret: It hasn’t been a scarf in weeks. I’m knitting a sweater for a pilot I met in Tokyo.
—M*A*S*H (TV), 1980
After I spin two spools of my Melting Mountain Stream roving, it’s time to ply them together. The end result is stunningly beautiful. Thin threads of turquoise wind around thicker threads of blue, then the opposite, then a stretch of mostly blue, then suddenly turquoise stripes, then heathered blue. It’s so wonderfully chaotic that it looks as if I knew what I was doing. But now what? I must learn to knit. Spinning is fairly uncomplicated, but knitters use a complicated language: *K1 , P2*, rpt bet * across, ending K1 . I read this as knit one, purl two, scream three. A friend helps me “cast” the stitches onto a needle to make a practice scarf out of purchased pink yarn. I knit, purl, and scream until the scarf is long enough. Now what? I take the scarf and needles with me to my next speaking engagement, a fiber festival in Lake Elmo, Minnesota. As I open my talk, I hold up my scarf, explain my problem, and the hands fly up. The woman in the front row casts off the scarf as I talk. Obviously, I’m going to have to learn that technique myself by tiptoein
g farther into the scary Do-It-Yourself forest.
I was always vaguely embarrassed by my grandmother’s do-it-yourself crafts, but now I understand what she was up to. No longer ranching, she needed to do something with her hands, to produce something. She wanted to entertain us—which the Kewpie Doll Powder Dispenser certainly did—and she wanted to create something practical.
These are three guidelines I could apply in my own life: (1) Make productive use of my hands; (2) Make something beautiful; (3) Make something useful.
More and more people are discovering what my grandmother knew—that making stuff with your hands is rewarding. The Great Recession was a great help in bringing this home to people. In an effort to save money but still give holiday gifts, millions of people made their own gifts. Said the manager of an Oregon craft store, “A lot of people are doing a do-it-yourself Christmas because of the economic downturn but also wanting to make their lives more sustainable, making stuff as opposed to buying stuff.” A woman in Rochester, New York, wanted to give gifts to twenty friends but didn’t have a lot of cash. For about $1 apiece, she knit coffee sleeves to replace the cardboard ones from coffee shops. Each took about an hour to knit as she watched TV.
If I start doing more things with my hands, whether that’s woodworking or gardening or knitting or baking cookies, I might fall into the condition made famous by the psychologist with the impossible name: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. That condition is “flow.” It means becoming completely involved in an activity not for the sake of the outcome but for the sheer joy of it. It means feeling alive when we are fully in the groove of doing something. According to Csikszentmihalyi, the path to greatest happiness lies not with mindless consuming but with challenging ourselves to experience or produce something new, becoming in the process more engaged, connected, and alive.
Studies have found that doing things with our hands helps our mental health. It relieves stress. According to Craft to Heal: Soothing Your Soul with Sewing, Painting, and Other Pastimes, the repetitive motions of some activities may evoke the “relaxation response—a feeling of bodily and mental calm that’s been scientifically proven to enhance health and reduce the risk of heart disease, anxiety, and depression.” Learning to do something with your hands also keeps the brain sharper because we grow more dendrite connections when we learn something new.
To dive deeper into the world of do-it-yourself fiber freaks—I’m sorry, fiber fans—I attend an all-day working meeting of the Zumbro River Fiber Arts Guild. Thirty women and one man spend the day in the basement of the Oronoco Community Center working on their projects. People bring spinning wheels and looms and bags of knitting. I bring my spinning wheel, but then I realize I’m surrounded by people who know how to knit, and I’m itching to knit my Melting Mountain Stream into something.
I befriend a young woman to my right who shows me how to cast on, which means putting the first row of stitches on the needle. I feel like a ten-fingered tree sloth, but finally get the hang of it. All goes well until I get too involved in the conversation around me and suddenly look down, having created a fearful snaggle of something. The woman on my left is one of those irritating people who’d rather teach you how to solve the problem than just fix it. She walks me through undoing the mess.
At the end of the day, the organization’s president has us go around the room and show off our projects. Carolyn is knitting a burgundy sweater full of cables. Lori shows off a sweater exploding with purple and pink. Judy displays a complicated scarf she’s woven. Robert holds up a brightly colored table runner.
When my turn comes, I hold up my knitting needles. “I have knit this rectangle.”
The crowd goes wild. I feel silly and proud at the same time. These fiber people are so encouraging that I want to keep at this, to figure it out. I have plans to turn the rectangle into a wrist warmer, but that’s about it for my knitting goals. Besides, spinning is fun now that I can sort of do it, and it feels basic, a connection with spinners stretching back into the past. I’m rediscovering my colonial roots.
Of course, at the rate I’m learning, I see that if most of us had to rely on our own skills to make our own clothing, our fashion expectations would change radically. The rectangle, formerly known as the loincloth, would make a rapid comeback.
Greener Than You Think
The key to saving the environment is not recycling. As Thoreau so wisely noted, we must strike at the root, not hack at the branches.
—TERE SAUDAVEL
Now that I know I’m not destroying the planet by raising sheep, I look into the environmental, political, and social aspects of wool and its “competitors,” cotton and synthetics. After a week of googling my fingers to the first knuckle, I decide the only way to avoid causing any environmental or political or social damage with my clothing choices is to forgo even the loincloth and go buck naked. My instinct is to drop the whole subject and not think about it. If I can’t bear to schlep the recycling into town, what am I doing paying attention to my clothing?
Cotton is the most-produced, most widely used fiber on the planet. Out of the annual world production of natural fibers of 30 million tons, 20 million are cotton. Jute comes in at 3 million tons, and wool is third at 2 million tons.
Cotton uses more than 25 percent of all the insecticides in the world, and 21 percent of all the herbicides, yet cotton is farmed on only 3 percent of the world’s farmland. The pesticides and synthetic, oil-based fertilizers often end up in groundwater, surface water, and our drinking water. In 1995, pesticide-contaminated runoff from cotton fields in Alabama killed 240,000 fish. Twelve of the top fifteen cotton pesticides in California caused birth defects, ten caused multiple birth defects, and thirteen were toxic or very toxic to fish or birds or both. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, seven of the top fifteen pesticides used on cotton in the United States are considered “possible,” “likely,” “probable,” or “known” human carcinogens.
The U.S. cotton industry has reduced its use of chemicals, but how many of us buy cotton clothing from other countries? The Environmental Justice Foundation advises people to “pick your cotton carefully,” since in many developing countries cotton involves child labor, rampant use of pesticides, and using too much water. I was shocked to see the photos of the Aral Sea in Central Asia, which has become a desert because two rivers were diverted to water cotton fields.
During cotton harvest, producers apply herbicides to defoliate the plants to make picking easier. Then to convert cotton into something soft enough for us to wear, it must be chemically processed. After it’s washed, cotton fiber is coated with polyvinyl alcohol sizing to make it easier to weave. After it’s woven, it’s bleached. Then the sizing is removed with a detergent. Then it’s washed with sodium hydroxide.
The cotton story keeps getting worse. The final step for most cotton garments, those easy-care clothes that are soft, wrinkle-resistant, stain- and odor-resistant is “finishing.” Any fabric or clothing labeled static-resistant, wrinkle-resistant, permanent-press, no-iron, stainproof, or moth-repellent likely includes some synthetic fiber or is a natural fiber that’s been coated with a chemical. Farmers can’t plant wrinkle-free cotton. To make it wrinkle free, the fabric has been treated. Chemicals used in finishing often cause allergic reactions and include “formaldehyde, caustic soda, sulfuric acid, bromines, urea resins, sulfonamides, and halogens.” Some imported cotton clothes are now impregnated with long-lasting disinfectants that are hard to remove. That explains the two cotton shirts I bought for only $15 apiece. They were fine until I washed them. Now they smell permanently like bug spray and are unwearable.
All this news about cotton makes me sad. I thought cotton was a clean, pure product. Organic cotton is of course an option, but I’ve noticed it’s not readily available in a wide range of colors. In fact, it’s as if the organic cotton mills think people who care about the planet only look good in cream, taupe, and pale green. Where’s the bright turquoise organic T-shirt? Maybe organ
ic dye doesn’t come in turquoise, or fuchsia, or screaming yellow.
I’m a little horrified at what goes into growing and processing cotton. In fact, if you compare raising sheep with growing cotton, wool looks pretty good. Raising sheep for wool, if done well, uses minuscule amounts of pesticides and herbicides. You don’t need to kill weeds in a pasture because sheep will eat them. How great is that?
I’ve decided to continue wearing cotton, but I resolve to find ways to replace a cotton garment with wool. I wonder if anyone makes wool underwear.
Wool’s other “competitor” is synthetic fabric. Most synthetics are made from chemicals. Most chemicals are made from petroleum. That’s right. Bubbling crude. Oil, that is. Black gold. Texas tea.
A few synthetic fibers come from renewable resources. Tencel and rayon both come from tree pulp. But otherwise, synthetics are made out of oil. The oil is used to make chemicals, then the chemicals are combined in creative ways and extruded through tiny holes to create threads. Remember those little Play-Doh factories where you could put different-sized holes over the opening, pressed down on the handle, and out came a long slender snake of Play-Doh? This is how synthetic fibers are made. Then these tiny strands of plastic are woven or knit into fabric. It’s plastic fabric.
Synthetics go by lots of names: acetate, acrylic, modacrylic, nylon, olefin, polyester, and the latest, microfiber. The demand for synthetic fiber, especially polyester, has doubled in the last fifteen years. Why is this bad? An article in Environmental Health Perspectives spells it out:The manufacture of polyester and other synthetic fabrics is an energy-intensive process requiring large amounts of crude oil and releasing emissions including volatile organic compounds, particulate matter, and acid gases such as hydrogen chloride, all of which can cause or aggravate respiratory disease. Volatile monomers, solvents and other by-products of polyester production are emitted in the wastewater. The EPA, under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, considers many textile manufacturing facilities to be hazardous waste generators.
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