Shall shear my rams and ewes and lambs

Roc day and the power of fiber arts

“I’ll sell my roc, my reel, my tow,

My guid grey mare and my hawkit coo

To buy myself a tartan plaid

To follow the laddie with the White Cockade.

~ from traditional Scottish song ‘The White Cockade’

from McIan’s ‘Highlanders at Home’ published in 1848.

Back in 2005, when I moved to New York to live with my sister Heather and her family, I was introduced to a beautiful world of fiber arts. My niece Katie, who was ten at the time, taught me how to spin, both on a wheel and with a drop spindle. Though I learned these things, and loved spending time with these talented women who spun and dyed their own wool and then either knitted or felted with it (or both!), at the time, I stayed on the periphery of these skills.

A picture of my niece in 2008 spinning at a local craft day.

One of the events that Heather and her friends would go to each year was Roc Day, January 7th, the day for hundreds of years that women would begin their daily work again after the revelry and celebration of the Twelve Days of Christmas (from December 25th until Epiphany, on January 6th).

Roc, or Rock, I learned, was an old word for Distaff. As

Folk Art Notes

recently posted, the day, more formally, is called St. Distaff’s day. The distaff, as pictured above, was an implement that held the raw fiber (wool or flax) that kept it separate, so that it wouldn’t get tangled up while the woman was spinning on her drop spindle. Early spinning wheels also had distaffs, but most often they were used when spinning with a drop spindle.

A medieval woman from the Luttrell Psalter, spinning and feeding chickens at the same time!

I have never used a distaff, but over the last several months, I have been diving into this wonderful world of sheep, carding and spinning my wool, and knitting. In August, I got some raw wool from a friend of mine, I bought a drop-spindle, and began to spin! It had been years, and I was very rusty, but it was also wonderful to feel the wool, wash it, card it, spin it.

My drop spindle sitting on a bed of wool. Don’t look too closely at my uneven spinning!

When I was studying archaeology at the University of Glasgow, I volunteered at some local museums for some learning programs they were doing for children. One of them was a Viking course, and I taught adorable Scottish school kids how to spin with a drop spindle, and I would tell them to imagine the huge Viking sails on their ships, and tell them that those sails, and everything else the Vikings wore, came from cloth that had to first be spun on a drop spindle. To my gratification, they were usually pretty impressed by this!

Medieval women spinning, carding, combing flax and weaving.

The first thing of interest that I dug up, on my first archaeological excavation while at uni, was a round object that was either a medieval spindle-whorl, or a loom weight.

The object in question, found in 2012 right outside a medieval churchyard, in the village of Dunning, Scotland.

This past weekend, Nick and I went to visit Katie who, after many years, is back in the area of NY where we all lived before, with her husband and their daughter. In fact, they are currently staying in the house of one of our friends, where we spent many happy hours spinning, knitting, talking and singing. My husband Nick and I went down to celebrate Christmas with her and her family, and my sister and Brother-in-law traveled up from North Carolina. We had a wonderful time being together.

On one of the days, Katie, Heather and I went to visit an old friend, Amy. She’s a woman who dyes, spins, knits and weaves beautiful sweaters, shawls, blankets and rugs, all from the wool she gets from her sheep. She knitted one of the beautiful sweaters I wore in Scotland (which I have sadly misplaced in the ten years since I graduated & came back to the states).

Amy’s beautiful sheep!

Amy welcomed us in and made us tea and fed us pumpkin pie bars. Her friend was there, and she and Katie spent most of the time knitting and crocheting. This was just two days ago, on Twelfth Night, so we jumped the Roc Day gun a little, but it was so lovely to gather with these women and discuss the beauty of woven textiles, and admire each others’ work.

At the end of it, she graciously offered to loan me a spinning wheel for six months! She had two wheels, and had me try them both, to see which I preferred. I was afraid of being terribly rusty, but when I sat down to the Ashford, it just seemed to flow. When I expressed my surprise, telling her that I hadn’t spun in years, she answered, “You’ve been spinning for thousands of years,” going on to explain that my female ancestors had spun for thousands of years, and that memory was within me.

I feel that strongly, when I handle the wool, when I spin or weave. Nick and I were talking about it and he said that it isn’t necessary to weave cloth, or spin, or knit clothes. We don’t depend on these crafts in order to clothe ourselves, as people used to. All these things are available to buy. And yet, it feels necessary. Being able to do these things feels like a gift, a creative thing of beauty that feeds my soul.