Spinning her yarn in theo ld style way
REPORTER DAVID MEDCALF CAUGHT UP WITH BRAY-BORN CARNEW RESIDENT RÓISÍN FLOOD, WHO HAS ACQUIRED A LOOM TO EXPLORE THE ANCIENT ART OF HOW TO MAKE YARN FROM THE FLEECE OF HER OWN SMALL FLOCK OF SHEEP.
BRAY native and Carnew resident Roisín Flood is the latest recruit to take up the revival of a very old craft.
She has joined the ranks of the spinners of yarn, making her own knitting wool from sheep fleeces.
It certainly makes a change from the day job with the family engineering company.
What inspired her to buy her own loom? The answer is very simple: ‘I am a knitter.’
In addition, she and husband Tony have a small flock of Jacob’s sheep grazing the fields beside their home.
They are shorn each summer but the fleece is worth next to nothing on the commercial market.
The price paid by the merchants is laughably low and everything is exported, breaking the link with the country where the wool comes from.
So Róisín has been stockpiling this soft and springy raw material for years, without deciding quite what to do with it – until now.
After the dozen ewes (and the ram which services them) received their annual haircut in June, she finally she took the plunge.
She acquired the loom from a man in County Kildare who imports and repairs such equipment for the growing band of ethusiasts. And then she took herself off to the old courthouse turned art centre in Tinahely to have a few lessons.
There she discovered that she was not alone, as the 1798 Spinners from County Wexford offered to take her under their wing.
‘I am a farmer in a very small way,’ she admits. ‘We have the sheep and a few donkeys, and my husband grows vegetables.’
The flock provides great entertainment to the household, such as the pet lamb which grew up sleeping between the two pet dogs each night.
Nevertheless, the Floods do not let sentiment stand in the way of sending their sheep off to the factory when the time comes, to make someone’s Sunday dinner.
The couple’s principal economic concern is not their 10 acres of a holding (‘it’s a hobby’) but stainless steel fabrication as the proprietors of Carnew Iron Crafts.
The firm’s world of commercial kitchens, extraction canopies and metal shelving is very far removed indeed from the peaceful whirring of the loom.
A more than competent welder, Róisín insists that her new pastime is not alien to the iron works, though she finds it hard to explain the link between the hardness of the clanging metal and softness of the yarn which comes from the gently whirring loom.
The Bray native comes from a background which draws on two very different strands of Ireland’s past.
She grew up in a part of Bray known as the ‘Soldier’s Road’ where the houses were built for military veterans by the British Legion after they had seen service in the Boer War or the trenches of France and Belgium.
Her grandfather was allocated one of these neat homes after fighting in World War One (‘ he never spoke about it’) and the place was passed down in due course to Róisín’s mother.
On the other side of the family, her great-grandfather was Easter Rising leader James Connolly, whose son Roddy Connolly had strong Bray connections though his mother was an English woman.
I’D HAPPILY SPIN ALL DAY. YOU CAN LET YOUR MIND WANDER – IT IS VERY CONTEMPLATIVE, AT LEAST UNTIL YOU GET A KNOT OR A BREAK
Her husband Tony Flood also hails from Bray, of Kilmacanogue stock, growing up in Avondale Park where he was living when he first met his wife-to-be.
They were married when she was aged 21 in the Queen of Peace church and later emigrated to Demark where Tony’s skills as a coppersmith and sheet metal worker were appreciated in the ship-yards.
The money in Denmark was good, allowing them to buy their old cottage surrounded by the rustic beauty of the south Wicklow hills with their bit of land when they returned home.
For a while he worked at Tyrrell’s in Arklow dock before the decision was taken in 1982 to break out and start their own business.
At the outset they made gates and railings to adorn buildings around the region, along with practical stuff such as gutter brackets which they supplied to hardware outlets.
‘I did a FÁS welding course,’ confirms Róisín, stressing with a smile that she served her time with the best of tutors: ‘ Tony was qualified to train me!’
Edging into the 1990s the enterprise discovered a niche in making kitchens and, though Tony is lately semi-retired, the company continues in that vein to this day.
They now have four adult children, three sons and a daughter – Rupert in Athlone, Johan who runs an associated business in Carnew, Ruth in Dublin and Bosco who continues the family tradition as a stainless steel engineer in Scotland.
All of which does nothing to explain why the lady of the household has decided to take up spinning, though it clearly provides a peaceful alternative to the stresses of business life.
‘I have always knitted,’ is the nearest Róisín comes to accounting for her latest addition to her portfolio of skills. ‘I paint as well and I have always been interested in working with my hands.’
As the stockpile of unwanted fleeces grew, she spotted the notice about the spinning workshop at the courthouse and immediately realised that this was the answer to an unspoken prayer.
She acquired her own spinning wheel from the man in County Kildare, along with a carding machine – a device which combs the raw fleece ready to be converted into yarn.
The new hardware came with a book of instructions but the words in the book were not enough and the advice of the experts has been vital.
‘I am a complete novice but the ladies sat me down and showed me how to do it,’ she says with gratitude.
The 1798 Spinners recognised that they had a natural talent on their hands, capable of running off two spools of yarn at her first sitting.
‘She is the fastest learner we have ever come across,’ says Stephanie O’Connor from Enniscorthy, one of her mentors. ‘She obviously has flair.’
Róisín reveals that she went home from the initial session in Tinahely with her yarn, took out her knitting needles and improvised an item which she hung on the wall.
She is delighted at last to be able to make items which are Irish in every particular.
Three times a grandmother, she loves to knit clothes for the new generation and she is keen to use wool as a natural material.
‘Wool is soft but stretchy, sturdy and durable, though you have to be careful with washing it. Pure wool will keep you warm in winter and cool in summer.’
The problem is that commercial wool merchants send all the fleeces they collect in Ireland to be processed abroad, making genuine Irish yarn a very scarce commodity indeed.
Now, with her new found skills, she is able to convert the coats of her own flock into distinctive garments of her own design.
The wool of the Jacobs is an especially satisfying medium, with a natural mix of brown, black and white, so there is no need to dye it to create artificial colouring.
Róisín feels that knitting is making a comeback in defiance of an age dominated by computers, televisions and other screens.
For a while after the disappearance of Heather Wool from Rathdrum in the nineties, it was often difficult to obtain supplies in the locality.
But that situation has imporved and anyway, now that she is capable of transforming fleece into yarn, she has her own limitless source of wool at her fingertips.
Those who spin by using their own hands and by working the ‘ treadle’ pedals of the loom with their feet know that this is a strictly not-for-profit activity.
Stephanie O’Connor does the maths and the figures are daunting: It takes around four hours to make 60 grams of yarn. To make a jumper requires maybe 1,000 grams of yarn and that is followed by perhaps 45 hours of clicking the needles.
At that rate, one jumper represents 112 hours of spinning and knitting, an investment of three working weeks. Calculated at the minimum wage of €9.15 per hour, that comes to a value for the hypothetical jumper of €1,000.
This notional price tag, on a par with the chrges levied by some exclusive Parisian bastion of haute couture, gets you a garment which is certainly a one-off complete with the bumps and lumps of genuine handmade.
‘My yarn is chunky because I am inexperienced,’ admits Róisín Flood as she prepares to convert a spare room in her home to accommodate her new pastime.
‘ The better you get, the finer it becomes. I’d happily do it all day. You can let your mind wander – it is very contemplative, at least until you get a knot or a break.’