antique_spinning

HOME TEXTILE TOOL MUSEUM

Yesterday we took a trip to the Home Textile Tool Museum in Orwell, PA. We had the place almost to ourselves so got to see things we hadn’t seen before.

Esther Weldon was dyeing skeins in a cauldron over a fire. Fortunately it wasn’t too hot that day. The flax in the little plot next to the barn was just starting to bloom. It looked to be about three feet high. Nearby a fellow was shoeing a horse.

I was intrigued by the elaborate chip carving on the table of a great wheel in the big barn.

In the house there were lots of spinning wheels including this rare Farnham accelerating wheel. We were told there are only three known to exist. There was also this three legged quill winder along with beautiful old Pennsylvania overshot coverlets.

Fred got a good look at the tools hanging in Bill Ralph’s old shop.

This flax break was shorter, taller and generally handier than some we have seen.

SMELL THE ROSES!

Sometimes you wind up spending so much time pulling weeds that you forget to stop and smell the roses. I wish you could smell the pale pink rose, the Milford rose, brought to Milford in the late 1700’s. It has the intense fragrance used in perfumery.

The honeysuckle is blooming too. It is a fragrance I recall from Mystic, CT where I lived for a while as a child.

The deeper pink rose is a Canadian Explorer rose that we love.

It isn't easy being green.....

All tattooed and vaccinated! The lambs get another dose of vaccine in a month.
Some are weaned already. Most of the lambs are for sale. We won’t be breeding the few ewes we will be keeping as pets. So these are our last lambs. I will really miss having such wonderful little creatures every spring, but we are just getting too old.If you are interested in some registered Finnsheep email me: Hatton at ptd dot net

BEARS!

Not just one, but three bears showed up by the edge of our field. There is a mother and two yearling cubs. They got into my brother-in-law’s trash. He leaves for work very early and put out his trash in the morning for pick up. The pick up was either late or didn’t happen so by around 11 AM the bears were in it. This is just a few feet from where a bear killed one of our sheep last fall.

Solar Minimum

Two nights ago we had a “killing frost.” I covered the potatoes and strawberries, but there is no way to cover the native chestnut oak trees that were hard hit by the frost.
The photo shows the chestnut oak by the house. The dark curled leaves are the youngest leaves. I don’t know if the frost can be directly attributed to the deep solar minimum we are in.

The last deep solar minimum happened in1911-13 and brought some chilly weather with it. The least number of sunspots counted in the last century happened in 1913. The next smallest number was 2008. The third smallest number was 1912. The seventh smallest number was 1911 and 2007 was the ninth smallest number. Check out the graph here

By chance I was just given a diary to read from that period from the same family as the diary of the two boys I transcribed in my book. The writers home was less than a mile from where I sit now in Northeast PA, about 75 miles as the crow flies from NYC.

The entry for January 13, 1912:
Clear and cold. 18 degrees below zero in the morning….

January 14, 1912 Partly cloudy and cold. 36 degrees below zero in the morning and did not get above eleven all day….

January 16, 1912 Clear and very cold. I drew logs all day. The thermometer stood 4 degrees above zero at noon.

The following month:
Feb 9, 1912 Clear and very cold. 20 degrees below zero when I started in the morning.

Feb 10, 1912 Clear and very cold. The thermometer stood at 4 degrees below zero at noon.

Another deep solar minimum happened in 1816 - The Year Without A Summer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer
While the 1816 chill is attributed to volcanic activity, it was also at the mid-point of the Dalton Solar Minimum

SIGNS

The sign is finished. The gold leaf in the lettering looks bad in the photo - - better in real life.

The tomato plants are longing to be outside, but tonight the forecast is for temperatures in the 20's. I hope they are wrong, but we are still in the deepest solar minimum since the early 1900's. This site tracks the daily sunspot number as well as other fascinating other-worldly stuff.