Script for

Episode 135:

An Interview with Deb Robson

Well, hello there, beloved Sheepspotter. I am taking a little break from creating new episodes right now, but today I am sharing a segment from my first podcast, Spin Doctor, for your listening pleasure. In this episode from 2010, I interviewed Deb Robson about the process of creating her magnum opus, The Fleece and Fiber Sourcebook. The Fleece and Fiber Sourcebook is the go-to source on animal fibers, and if you don't own a copy, then pause this episode, go order one, and then come back and listen to this conversation with Deb, which was recorded before the book came out. Enjoy it. Next up, an interview with Deb Robson.

Deb Robson has worked as a book editor for Interweave and other commercial presses and for various university presses. She's also served as editor of Spinoff and Shuttle, Spindle, and Die Pot magazines. She writes essays, articles, fiction, and poetry. She's done book and magazine design, and she's an artist in many media, including prints, painting, and of course, textiles. Last but not least, she runs Nomad Press, which publishes books for fiber artists, including Priscilla Gibson Roberts' Spinning in the old way. In addition to all this, Deb has been fascinated with wool for the past 30 years, and she, along with her co-writer Carol Acarius, is in the process of collecting her massive knowledge of wool and other animal fibers into the Fleece and Fiber Sourcebook, to be published this spring by story. In the interview that follows, we talk about that huge project, about the difficulty of documenting the history of livestock breeds, especially the Cheviot, which had been the topic of a recent post of Deb's blog, The Independent Stitch, and her hopes for the book's place in the lives and hearts of spinners.

We recorded this interview in the classroom at the Spinning Loft, so from time to time, you'll hear some background noise coming from the shop. We begin in the media race with Deb talking about the difference between this book project, which she sometimes calls Voldemort, and other, quote, normal books. Now, a normal book, you either write out of your head, or you do research and then write, gathering things together, putting stuff from your head in it as well.

But this one, we did also have to obtain all these fibers. I washed, I prepared, and I spun, which in terms of time is a lot more than the research and writing piece. Right, right. In terms of arduous work, I mean, it's pleasant work. That said, I had to watch how much time I spent washing, for example, because my back would start objecting. Because I wash in my bathtub. I don't have a full setup.

So the timing had to be right, too. I mean, I could wash 12 batches, and then I had to wait until they dried. And was I going to be home long enough? What could I pack in the car to take with me? This went with me everywhere for three years some piece of this project was always with me and sometimes it was my laptop sometimes it was the whole car i've seen those pictures on yeah of the whole of the whole book going with you yeah yeah well actually that would be a segment that would have been just a segment yes yes although my car was full uh-huh yeah so it grew from a small book to be done in eight months, to a quite large book. It will be well over 400 pages. And it was going to be small format. It's going to be a standard large format. It was going to be paperback. It's going to be hardcover.

And it's going to have not everything we pulled together because it will never be done. I mean, Carol got me into it. I will also say Carol got me out of it because she's someone who can say, okay, we have to stop there. And I will always come up with another question I have to answer. Right. Right. I mean, I'm going to be teaching for three days this week. And, and part of what I'm going to say is that's one of the questions I still have to look into. You know, people are going to ask things I'm going to say, don't know yet because it's, it is endless and fascinating. Well, I felt that I learned that about you. read the cheviot entry in your blog that you are a person who always has another question i do which is a great way to make a book but not such a great way maybe to finish it's really a lousy way to finish a book right the other thing is that i am very easily bored.

I burn out on topics. I will learn all about something, and then I'll go away and learn something else. I have never yet reached that point on Walt. Why do you think that is? I keep finding it weird. It's like I walk through what I think is a door into a room, and I find a whole palace there. It's like this question. It's like going through Alice, you know, dropping down the hole into Wonderland. There's stuff we don't know. Well, that's what I found so fascinating about the, and maybe you could just, we can just back up and you can, you could explain about the Cheviot moment because that was what that blog post was like for me. Oh, there's, you know, there, there are the ones in Southern Scotland and then there are the ones in Northern Scotland and then there are the ones in Wales. And then all of a sudden there are these miniature ones in Canada. Where did they come from? Right. And Carol's looked into it and she hasn't been able to track for sure. Right. And there are people assuring us that A is the story, that they went from here to here to here and that's how it happened, which I believe is one valid possibility. But having been an editor at university presses, one of the things I have done a great deal is fact check and being around scholarship a lot. And I am not a scholar, but I hold myself to those standards.

So what I try to do is say, my perception is, or as far as I've been able to determine. And I don't want to waffle on making statements, but I also don't want to come out flat with something that's wrong, although I might, you know, at any point.

So Carol has looked into some of the Cheviot stuff. And a lot of times on sheep breeds, okay, when you're moving them from one country to another, it's actually much harder right now than it used to be. It's always been difficult because you don't want to carry diseases. So you usually have to bring them in, you have to quarantine them, you have to have all this paperwork done, you have to meet them sometimes at the, you know, likely to be a good, There should be a documented paper trail. Oddly enough, on the fiber side, with breeds that are of interest to textile people, it's been somewhat better recorded in published, generally available sources. And that's partly because of Spinoff and Shuttle Spindle and Dipot and other places like that. Because spinners are interested in, for example, Oh, blue-faced lester just got imported to North America, which a lot of people look around and they see breed-specific. They see merino, and now they're seeing blue-faced lester, and they're seeing generic wool. They're thinking blue-faced Leicester has been here. Blue-faced Leicester came into Canada in the 70s, the U.S., the 80s. Wow. Okay. Stuff can happen really, really fast in the sheep. Some breed societies document pretty closely where the importations and so forth have gone. Some of them don't.

And the Cheviots are one of those. So it's like somebody could do a PhD dissertation, probably in a history department that cares about agriculture, on what the heck's happened with the Cheviots. Where they moved when and what breed went where. and did the ones that came into the U.S. And are now known as American miniatures come from the Brecknick Hill or did they come from the border Chevy, which is now just called Chevy? Right. Right. Just to make things a little more interesting. Change names. So do breed societies, do they think of themselves as archivists of their breeds? No. Okay. So that's another problem. A few of them do. And thank heaven for the ones that do. No, they generally think of themselves as, I would say, more like trade associations, especially for the meat breeds. They are interested in the contemporary economics of the breed. And that's their focus. Our breed is the best. That will bring you the greatest return.

So they're not necessarily keeping the kinds of records that a historian of the breed would need in order to answer the kinds of questions you were trying to answer about the Cheviot. Right. Within the Breeding Association, there are probably individuals who have that.

Information, but the society itself may not record it. Some of them do. Blueface, Lester Union has a beautiful set of web pages that traces. Yes. Yay. So now, were you doing most of the research on the actual breeds, or was that your collaborator's job? I mean, how did you sort of define things? Okay. Carol did the animal pieces and husbandry. I did fiber, and I did all the spinning. We both acquired fiber, and then I did all the washing, and all the spinning. We both did history. So she drafted it, but then I would come in and do a bunch on it too. And we kicked it back and forth. We actually collaborated beautifully. Neither of us, we're both going to hold out for something we really strongly believe in, but we're both focused on what's the best thing to end up for the reader. So like I'd rewrite her sentences, and she'd revise mine, and we'd check them back against each other. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, it worked really well. Yeah. So what is your dream of how spinners are going to use this book?

What? I, okay, I have a mission here. Okay. Tell us about your mission. Okay. A number of years ago, when I, I edited Charles Milne and the IPOC for the Weavers Guild of America for about a year and became aware of the Navajo Sheep Project. And the fact that those were endangered animals that Lyle McNeil and some other folks were working to conserve. Became aware that what was then the American Minor Breeds Conservancy is now the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy. Has been for quite a few years. Edited spin-off, did this and that. At some point, read through the list of endangered breeds on the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy and the Rare Breeds Survival Trust, English conservation organization. And realized that those lists were the most incredible hand-spinning fibers. And I thought, that's because the industry wants mid-grade white fiber that is uniform and easy to process. And these fibers that we value, that are to me fundamental to our craft, we're at risk of losing. Which ones in particular?

Oh, Cotswolds and Lincolns. And Shetlands technically aren't on the list, but Shetland colored fiber is endangered. At this point, a lot of the downbreeds are even endangered. But the longwolves in particular got to me because some of them are successful. Romneys are being successful because they're a good meat breed too. But the value of wool in today's market has gone way, way, way down with the exception of handspinners. And if we can create a market for it, and processing facilities can handle it, and they do exist. If we can turn it into yarn, then knitters, weavers, and crocheters, as well as spinners. So my sort of long-term goal is to keep the materials available so that we can still express the full range of our craft, which we can't. It's like if a woodworker had only pines.

Or a cook had only white flour. You know, they would not have access to what they need to fully express what they're capable of. So my mission here is to help people become aware of the glorious bounty of materials we have and figure out how to use them. Because you have to think beyond the super soft machine washable sweater in order to appreciate these fibers. But you can use any craft with them. You know, just because you're knitting doesn't mean that a yarn that might immediately suggest weaving to me isn't appropriate to be knitting with. You have to think about what you're making. So that's one goal. And the goal beyond that is is to make sure that this resource that represents thousands of years of human culture is not extinguished in the next 30 to 50, which it could be. Right. So, yeah.

Yeah, it's, that is very, that's such a good, succinct way to put it. And it's because there's so much bound up with these animals. There's so much of human existence bound up with these animals. And the thought of them, the thought of losing them is so.

Well, and, you know, and conserving wild species is equally important. It's a lot more press time. Right. That's true. There is no World Wildlife Federation for domestic. There isn't. Domestic animals. Yeah. We do have the regional breed society or conservation societies, but there is not one that is global. Right there are databases that that are starting to try to pull that information again we had to stop this book and this was one a set of boundaries i put on it really early the definition was fibers that would be reasonably available to english-speaking fiber workers reason we had to do that was because when you get into let's see the indian subcontinent has maybe a hundred breeds of sheep. China has a lot of breeds of sheep. There are a whole lot in Europe that we couldn't cover. We did some, the ones that have basically come across into the English-speaking. So we had to stop someone. I would go forever, but yeah, I would never be done. So it's good to have, you know, boundaries. Right. Yes, that's important. So your hope is that hand spitters will use this information, expand their sense of.

Fibers that they want to work with and thus create a market for yes not only hand spinners but knitters crocheters weavers knitters are starting to get on this i mean so too there's very encouraging several really fine books there's Clara Park's book there's a fine fleece number of books have come out aimed at knitters there are starting to be more breed specific yarns which are lovely.

And as people understand how to use them, I mean, they can expand their craft by experiencing these materials in ways that they will find absolutely delightful. But, I mean, hand spinners can only go through a certain amount. Yes, that's why I think we really owe Clara Parks a debt because theirs are such a bigger market than we are. Right. Well, I like to pick up a skein of commercially spun, beautifully dyed yarn and just start knitting too. If I had my druthers, I would always knit with my own hand-washed, hand-spun, hand-dyed, etc. My life doesn't work that way. Right. Sometimes you just need a sweater. Yes. Yes. And sometimes you want to experience what somebody else has put together just to say, what's this life? Right. Right. I'm really, I just ordered five skeins of the Jared Flood yarn. Yeah. And for precisely that reason that I, you know, I really want to see what that particular blend of wools is like, what the hand is like and how it takes color and all that stuff. I have one skein. Yeah. Yes, it's lovely. I like it a lot. That is a blend in the sheep.

It is a Target Columbia Cross. Oh. Which actually... I must have misread. It's a little bit ambiguous, but I checked with Jared. Okay. And actually, that's good in terms of his ability to produce a consistent product. And this is a blog post I haven't written yet. I want to write about his yarn in particular because it's the one that I had in my hands. And the challenge is a near miracle of producing a consistent line of commercial yarn from a naturally occurring substance that is variable by definition. And one of the ways he's done that is by finding a supplier who has a large enough flock that produces consistent enough wool that he can rely on it and that he can have enough control over what's coming out the other end. Very interesting. Because we walk into a store and say you've got a skein of Cascade 220, you've knitted almost your whole sweater. You're short. You need to be able to go in the store and pick something off the shell. We think about dialogue. But there's also the texture, the twist, the feel, everything else.

And the fact that that can be done is astonishing. That's also part of what narrows our options among the worldwide wool population, the need to do that. But yeah, Jared has found a really interesting wool resource there, and he's doing some fascinating things. Okay. Well, that actually, I mean, in a way that makes it even more interesting to me because I was really attracted to it because I love turkey. It's one of my favorite wolves. And I thought that the addition of the Columbia would be really interesting. So I'm glad you told me that. Yeah. It's at the genetic level. Uh-huh. Yes. Okay. Rather than at the milk. So now, how many sheep breeds in the book? I don't know.

She's lost track okay it's just as well for my sanity yeah the subtitle is over 200 animals now for example camel is an animal and i think we have six or eight samples and for example with some of them well the north ronald see okay you have one breed there, But every color has a slightly different fiber profile to it. So I would say we have 100 to 125 sheep breeds. Okay. But some of those may be a bit broader than expected.

Okay, so that's 125 sheep reeds, and then all the camelids, I'm assuming. All the camelids. Yeah, we should actually, I mean, we should count from the table of contents and try to get some actual numbers, because I really don't know. Okay. The bunnies, and then the bunnies, the goats. Mm-hmm. The several goats. The several goats, the big shaggy animals with undercoats, the yaks and the... The yaks and the musk oxen. we have cattle in there, we have cattle's mostly been blended it's been used in like Scandinavian countries cow it doesn't spin terribly well by itself I haven't found even highland cattle didn't spin particularly well but blended into wool, reindeer is not very easy to spin in fact don't try.

Again it could be blended in oh who do we have in there Oh, well, then there's the New Zealand possum. Oh, right. We got some combed foxes to stay alive. Also chinchillas, the same. Very hard to get hold of. That one there isn't really a market for yet or supply, but there are people raising for fiber that is non-pelt. So, living animal.

A wolf. Wolf, dog, cat, sponsor cat. Spun some cat what was that like it's just a really fine fiber just really fine and short, okay it is not as fine and short as vicuña did you spin i did i did wow how did you get it um it was actually contributed to it we bought some fibers but a whole lot people generously shared and the vicuña came that way otherwise it wasn't in my budget right and vicuña was one of the only fibers that I shifted from my regular spinning process for. For this book, because of what I had to cover and the time I had in which to cover it, which was a moving target, I had one basic setup. I had a lendrum wheel, traveler, they don't call it traveler, whatever it is, the folding And it could go anywhere with me. I did not pad the bobbin or anything. Regular fire, regular everything.

And I didn't have much time with each breed. So one of my apprehensions about this book is like, all this yarn I've spun is going to be out there. And I had like 15 seconds for each one. It's a little more than that. But there were no do-overs to speak of. It's like, okay, my goal with spinning the fiber is simply to get my hands on it so that when I'm writing about it, I am not writing about an abstract. Right. I initially did the samples for me as a writer. And then as they began to accumulate, the publisher and everybody else said, we've got to photograph some flipbook. And I'm going, gah. Right. And I can imagine feeling that way as the spinner. Yeah. But they were right. You know, I mean, it's going to be really valuable. I can show you some threads. Oh, great. We can't show them on the podcast. But anyway, so I had the Lenderman. It had nothing special on it at all. I did. It's a borrowed wheel. I changed the drive band. I had to change the tension knob, and there were a couple other things that I had to fix because I wore them out.

But the vicuna, I had to go to a Tahkli spindle. I would have, if I had been spinning a lot of vicuna, I would have gotten a lot of cotton, and I would have set up my charka. I have a T-frame charka, and I would have gotten in practice with the cotton on the charka, and that would have been my tool of choice. As it was, I had no time. time and when you are in a hurry is not when to spin vicuna i can imagine yeah you know so i did enough sample for the book and i did it on a Tahkli and i let my breath out and i said okay, on to the next on to the next which is a hard way to spin vicuna yeah i bet, yeah yeah you know how has your spitting changed through this process.

I look forward to spinning. Okay, I tell you, I got to the bunnies at the end. There wasn't that much in each sample of bunny. You know, it was maybe a quarter to a half an ounce. And I had been spinning little spurts for three years. And I just said, okay, I'm just going to keep spinning. I'm going to spin until I have spun all of this bunny. And I did that repeatedly. And I knew that I was being totally self-indulgent because I needed to move on. But what I would say that I came out of it with is probably the ability to really, really appreciate being able to spin a single fiber for a while. Yeah. And also, I mean, you must have gone for three years without ever spinning enough for a project. Even a headband. Wow. Yeah. That is such a sacrifice. It was and it wasn't. And what suckered me into this book was the absolutely irresistible temptation of getting my hands on all those fibers.

So the tradeoff for that was, no, I haven't. Right. No headbands. No headbands. No headbands. No. And this was really, really hard. There were a few that I had made, you know, if I got into a rhythm, you know, I'd maybe comb up six puffs or something and spin it and whatever. I would think of the wool and think, okay, what do I want to say about this wool in three yards or less? You know, and some of them I'd spin up a textured piece and a singles and a two-ply that's fine or whatever. The thing is that any yarn, any fiber can be spun into so many possibilities. And while we can't show those, I can at least not lock people into this has to be this X kind of yarn. Right, right. Okay, I've gotten lost in terms of what I was saying. You were talking about not being able to spin a headband. Right. Oh, I spun a little bit extra of some of them thinking, I will come back and I'll at least knit some samples. Well, I went off to teach at UK Knit Camp in August, having recently sent all of my boxes of fiber to the publisher in Massachusetts. I wanted to drive them out. I mean, they were that serious. yeah they were that serious yeah but they needed them like now and it's like.

Three of three boxes got lost for a week and I was I was thinking okay now rationally which boxes were those and how long will it take me to reconstruct what was in them I think I could do it in six months oh they did show up so i went off to uk knit camp to teach and the boxes are with the publisher and they say, we want little swatches made of anything for which there's fiber knitted and or woven. And we know, of course, that you can't do this because you're not available. So we'll have somebody else do it. So that means somebody else got to knit yours. Yep. The swatches that you were specially, you were specially spinning extra for. Yep well and I'm glad they got to do it but.

That is the saddest story so I'm over in the UK thinking oh, So, now when I want to have swatches for teaching, I have to go back to the wheel and spin more little bits of yarn. Oh. So, I'm doing some of that. But I've put myself in this other mental framework, which may be my form of Zoloft, which is perhaps my mission in life right now is to spin samples. I really. Spin monuments. Yes. Yes. Yeah. And make swatches. So I really, really would like to spin a whole something. And I am on email right now thinking about what that might be with some friends. Good. And I don't want to. It might not happen this year.

So do you want to tell us a little bit about your DVD? Oh, the DVD. I don't know a lot about it yet. Oh, because you haven't done it yet. Because I haven't done it yet. So you're off for two weeks. You're off to home. Right. So I only have to go down the road to do that. Interweave has asked me to do a DVD on rare breeds of wolves. So, what I'm thinking about now as I get ready for that is, you know, how to group them and how to present them. I'm going to limit, again, I'm going to limit to the ones on the ALBC and RBST lists. American Life Cycle Breeds Conservancy, Rare Breeds Survival Trust. So, U.S. and U.K. or North America and U.K. So, we will not be learning more about Marina.

It's not a rare breed. It's my particular bug. It's not a rare breed. It is not. It is not. Yeah. It is one of the benchmarks of the world of sheep. It has to be understood, but it is not going to be part of the DVD. Excellent. So do you have a sense of how you're going to do this, or are you going to be showing images of the sheep? Are there going to be images? I'm working on that. I know that Linda Ligon, who's coordinating this with me, wants to have some posters on the back wall with some breeds of sheep, and we've worked on photos for that. I don't know what I'm going to do for the ones that aren't shown there. I haven't thought through that yet. Partly because I would have to get permission to use the pictures. And I don't know if I have time to do that. The emphasis will be on the relationships between the breeds and on preparing fibers. Because that's the place people get stuck. Yes. Okay, if it's not all white, three inches long, and medium crimp, what do I do with it? You know, if I'm picking up a handful of fiber and it's got Kemp hair and down in it, okay, what next? Although some of them don't have that profile. So anyway, Shetlands, I mean, Shetlands are going to be a whole segment, I think, because they're so complicated. And they're not technically on either list.

But because the colored Shetlands are endangered, the breed itself is not. So I'm going to talk about what makes it endangered and.

It will be some advocacy, as Linda has pointed out to me. She says, you are an advocate. And I said, yeah, I guess so. I mean, it's not a role that I take on. I would call myself passionate about it. I would call myself an appreciator of. And it tips over into advocacy. And they're okay with that? Oh, yeah. Good. But they want to make sure that I'm also teaching spinning. So as I'm planning it out, what I'm going to do is look at each group in terms of what is a technique of preparation or spinning or whatever that can be expressed through this group of breeds. That sounds great. Do you have a sense of how long the production cycle is and when that will be out? Apparently once we're in the studio they can actually have it done in six a week, so it may be late january early february because there's holidays yes right and that'll slow things down are you thinking about what you're gonna wear yeah it's gonna be jean okay i don't know what on top yet but um i have a couple of ideas but i said linda can i come my jeans she said said.

Good, I'll come as myself. Good. Yeah. Oh, definitely come as yourself. Thank you so much. Well, thank you. It's been fun.