We’re renting our homestead, and every now and then we have a think about where we might like to eventually buy one. We’re pretty sold on the idea of going north, rather than south, so we’ve been busy getting to know the northlands and yesterday we took off on another impromptu land scouting mission.

I say land scouting, but although we did look at property prices, it’s perhaps more correct to say that we were region scouting. We’re trying to figure out which areas we should look at more closely.

The area we are living in, on the edge of Swanson, is quite beautiful, but the downside of being so close to Auckland is that land prices are high due to the common desire of buying a small lifestyle block and commuting to work in the big city. Unless something very dramatic happened to shake up this pattern, we couldn’t afford to buy in the area we’re currently living in.

If you look at property prices, there’s a magic circle around auckland where land that is within commuting range of the city is subdivided for premium prices. Anyone wanting to buy within that land is probably best served by waiting until petrol gets more expensive, and then buying in areas that are currently seen as a reasonable commute by car, but don’t have access to the train, as I’d guess these will come down in price. Failing that, it seems best to look further away.

As one drives north of Auckland, the magic circle of expensive land seems to extend to about Warkworth. Warkworth has the feeling of a country town, but it’s strongly influenced by the influx of commuters and also the tourists passing through. This, and all my perceptions of Northland towns is fairly uninformed. I’ve on been living in NZ for a couple of years, and I’m trying to judge them based on rather short visits. However, it’s the only viewpoint I have, so lets press on further north.

Next major stop up the Route 1 is Wellsford. Wellsford feels to me like it’s less influenced by Auckland, and has all the ingredients of a real country service town. It’s the major destination for lots of farmers east of the Kaipara to get all their agricultural bits and bobs. It’s also got the major highway of course, and so is used by tourists visiting their batches as well. It has a McDonalds, and a tiny bit of “mini-suburbia”.

North of Wellsford is Kaiwaka, which is a bit of a favourite of mine. Kaiwaka is now fairly popular with lifestylers who want to move to the country, stop working regularly in town, and set up their beautiful little homestead. Retail stores in Kaiwaka include the gourmet cheese shop, the excellent italian bakery, and the very creative cafe Eutopia. These tend to indicate that there are a fair few affluent people in the area now, and also a fair few people who “a little bit hippy” (like me). To round off that last demongraphic, Kaiwaka is home to two lovely ecovillages and the Koanga Gardens store.

So being a middle class greenie myself, you can see why I would like Kaiwaka, but I’m curious about it’s resilience in the face of future change. It’s success is at present very much determined by the lifeblood of traffic traveling up and down route 1. Without that, it’s retain stores would have to adapt, and the town itself currently doesn’t have much in the way of economic activity centered around country life, with the main exception of the Sawmill. Mainly I mean that I imagine a lot of local farmers currently visit Wellsford for many of their needs.

I’m pretty confident about Kaiwaka’s ability to rise to meet these challenges in a post oil world. In particular Kaiwaka has one of the most active Transition Town groups in the Northlands, and the skills and people at Otamatea and Kohatu Toa ecovillages shouldn’t be ignored.

In an optimistic powerdown future, then I could see Kaiwaka really leading the charge with creative responses to a future with less oil. In the case of a future involving a bit more of a sudden collapse, then I wonder if I should be looking for places with more resilient local infrastructure. Perhaps there’s an advantage in being surrounded by experienced and practical local farmers, rather than idealistic lifestylers (even if I’m in the latter category myself).

Yesterday’s drive through the country had two main purposes. Firstly, to try and find some places that might work well in the latter situation, and secondly to explore the potential of towns with water access to the Kaipara harbour. These two goals together lead us to Dargaville, which is on route 12, the tourist route for the west coast, and is on the Wairoa river, a great big fat (and brown) river feeding into the north end of the Kaipara.
 Dargaville is traditionally a port town, and although on the river it does appear that it was once regularly visited by ocean going ships. In it’s early days, it’s main industries were logging Kauri trees and digging up Kauri gum. It has a few historical attractions for the tourist, like it’s museum, but mostly it’s a true service town for quite a large surrounding area of farmland. There aren’t any Kauri trees to been seen anymore, but this area now prides itself on being the kumara capital of NZ. Apparently the soils to the west of Dargaville are fairly sandy, compared with the usual clay based soils, and good for growing kumara (and no doubt many other things).

As well as being a port, Dargaville has a train line. It goes up to Whangerie, or down to Auckland. Unfortunatelly, it doesn’t run passenger services, only cargo (there are no regular passenger trains in the northlands), but I’m still going to call that a significant asset.

In a post oil future, I’d predict that Dargaville’s role as a serious farming area, in particular one that grows a lot of carbohydrates (kumara) as well as the usual cows and sheep, will make it a vital food source for Auckland. I also like to imagine a revival in water travel. The end of the current passenger line from Auckland is Helensville, and from there one could board a boat and travel in basically a straight line across the Kaipara to Dargaville, rather than the long way around that the road takes. I’m keen to give this trip a try and see how long it takes.

What are the downsides of Dargaville? Well, for starters, I might not find many people I get along with. I am a bit of a hippy and a middle class city boy at heart. Also, the area around Dargaville is dead flat, and my dream property always has rolling hills and mountains in the background. Not just flat, Dargaville is also pretty close to the water. I’m pretty worried that only a few metres of sea level rise will put it under water.

Seeing both these positives and negatives in Dargaville, we continued to follow the Wairoa river north east, thinking that as it got a bit further into the hills, we might find our perfect landscape and still have access to water transport. There are no other major towns in that direction, so if you lived up that way you’d want to be able to reach Dargaville by boat in a reasonable amount of time.

However, the landscape is stunning. The river winds it’s way through meandering valleys, with mountains rising up in the background. The train line also follows the river. Transport by water, road and train. Beautiful scenery. Affordable land prices. The only downsides might be the isolation (it’s a fair way from Auckland), and possibly the lack of like minded people.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on the sort of area you live in or would like to live in, and how you think it might function if oil was scarce and expensive.

My final post for today, I promise. 

We are starting to have some gorgeous weather again, yesterday was warm and sunny all day.Perfect for gardening.

Buffie and I got stuck into the only usable garden bed, dividing it up into plots, creating paths and planting all the little seedlings I’d either grown or we had purchased. There are beans, chinese cabbage, angelica, feverfew, beetroot, onions, spring onions, melissa (lemon balm), lettuces (several kinds including cos and rocket), sorrel, three types of thyme (lemon, pizza and chicken!), pyrethrum, parsel, artichokes and a few others I can’t think of right now. There is also a tamerillo (sp?) and a fig tree in this bed.

Creating the paths was a great way to help raise up the beds on either side of it.

It’s not nearly enough, but it’s a great start and a few of these items are actually perennials and will remain in the bed permanently.

I mentioned that we discovered our goose and duck nests a little while ago and thought I should upload a few photos.

This little girl is very broody and hasn’t left the nest in a week. I feel so sorry for her that there will be no little babies but we do have plans of getting a gander as soon as we can find one.

Fortunately this stroppy little girl leaves her eggs and feeding time so we can take the new ones. But you should here the ruckus she makes when the theft is discovered. 

The ducks found a wonderful hiding place on the other side of the paddock to the geese.

We’ve found some great recipes for the eggs, our main concern is that we don’t know when most of them were laid, or how long they last so we are being very tentative about cracking them open into separate bowls and ensuring that they are cooked properly.

From left to right, little chicken egg (either from what I think is a bantam or from the young shaver (dotty the demented chicken, poor girl is a little deformed and we are not sure if it’s a birth defect or if the horse kicked/stepped on her as she does like to peck around under him while he’s eating), next we have a normal chicken egg, a duck egg and a goose egg.

Eggs have porous shells, so you can’t wash them or you just let the bacteria into the egg, the goose seem to build individual little nests around each individual egg, Buffie thinks it’s the sweetest thing and now that they are laying I think they have redeemed themselves in her eyes. For a while there she decided they were annoying, noisy, food gussling birds that sometimes ate some grass.

Due to some advice from one of the ladies on the yahoo weaving group I joined, I discovered a threading error which is what resulted in the bad sheds. In this photo here you can see how the purple thread cuts over the top of the pink one?

I had several of these throughout the width of the warp, one I recalled thinking “it should be ok, it’ll sort itself out I’m sure” and the rest I simply didn’t see. The reason was this, say I had only 4 warp threads, Thread number one should go into the first heddle on shaft number one, thread two onto shaft two, three onto three and four onto four, however, I had crossed threads behind the back beam and hadn’t realised it, so what at first glance liked correct actually ended up with thread one in shaft one, but thread two in say shaft 3 and thread three in shaft 2, or something of that nature. 

Once I realised that correcting this would mean removing about 1/8th of the warp, and I decided to just take it all out and start again. This of course meant that I could put the warp threads over the back beam this time (which I did). I didn’t actually mind redoing the entire thing, I really do like this stage of warping the loom, I find threading the heddles and sleying the reed to be peaceful activities for the most part.

So, long story short, my loom is now thread correctly, I’m producing a lovely shed and I’ve actually woven about 30cm’s of fabric. It’s ugly, the selvedges are horrible and the betting is inconsistent, but it’s a start and I’m learning a great deal from the experience.

At the moment I’m concentrating on trying to get a good rhythm of throw-beat-change-feet as recommend by Peggy Osterkamp. I’m finding her 3 books and DVD to be invaluable resources right now. I’m finding that things are a little uncoordinated at the moment, I’m having trouble lifting my legs up to depress the peddles, I’m going to try with a taller chair to see if that helps. If you look at the photo above, I believe that most of my beating errors have happened at the times I’ve dropped the shuttle, next time it happens I think I will put a pin in and check it once I’ve moved on a few more inches.

Currently I’ve weaving with a 2ply yarn from Touch yarns, it’s lovely stuff and the closest match I could find to the warp. I’m going to attempt to dye some of the white wool pink, blue and black so that I can have a bit of a play with colour and then I guess I should start thinking about an actual project.

I would also like to say thank you to everyone who has posted advice and resources to help me figure out my error. I’m storing it all away for future trouble shooting.

edit - one other thing that I found invaluable from Peggy’s books was the simple hint that your boat shuttle should slide along the bottom edge of your beater, if it has one, and the bottom of your sheds should rest on that same shelf. When I had a quick go on this loom at the previous owners house, he never mentioned this, even when I was trying to throw the shuttle across the unsupported warp threads! I would have kept doing that and wondering why my shuttle kept falling down. USE THE SHELF!

Firstly, sorry about the sideways photos, strange things happen when you upload photos with various programs from various other programs and I’m too lazy today to try and fix it. So on with the story.

This tie-up was actually done, prior to me threading the heddles and sleying the reed. My intent was to to just try and figure out how it all worked. The result is that I now have 2 treadles tied up, working 4 shafts (two shafts per treadle). It’s the most basic tie-up in my weaving book so seemed like the best bet for my first try. However, the first photos are all from me and Craig playing around with things prior to getting my book. We were attempting to tie up all six treadles to see what they would all do, it was a fun/frustrating experience that did give us a better idea where all the cords were connected etc. 

The loom came with little hooped bits of metal that had sticks of bamboo threaded through them, I’ve ditched those, re-drilled some of the holes and now the cords can be put through the holes and pegged underneath, it mostly just looks neater imho. We also ended up removing all the cords that we were not using for the basic tie-up.

The resulting sheds (now that it’s all warped up) look like this:

The entire shed is only about an inch or so wide, not nearly big enough to pass a shuttle through and the warp threads aren’t separating evenly in the first shed *sigh* now I have to figure out how to fix that.

Maybe I’ll just go back to looking at pretty photos I’ve taken of the frosty farm morning

I finally got some better photos of our lovely animals.

And yesterday Buffie discovered where the geese are laying their eggs and we took about 8 eggs from one of the two nests. It made a lovely japanese style omelette to go with our dinner last night. The eggs are HUGE by the way, about the size of 3 or 4 large chicken eggs at least. They don’t seem to have the greasy feel of duck eggs which I’m very glad about. We still aren’t sure exactly what breed of geese they are so if anyone has some idea please let me know.

We are now thinking of getting in a drake and a gander so that we can start breeding up the birds for dinner.

We are also still working on what breed of chickens, roosters and ducks we have. We think the ducks might be pekin ducks. What ever they are I think they are lovely. I’m pretty certain that at least 3 of our chickens are brown shavers. I want to get some dog houses for the ducks and geese to lay their eggs in so that it’s easier for us to find them and hopefully when we get in the boys it will be nice and cozy for the babies we hope to get.

I’ve finished clearing out another of the overgrown raised beds and planted it with potatoes, Craig has made a start on another one and Buffie has been collecting load after load of horse poo and piling it nicely around the fruit trees as well as clearing back kaikua that has started to straggle a lot of the trees.

The greenhouse is certainly working out wonderfully (and was the only warm and dry place out in the gardens for most of the day yesterday). I’ve gotten in a few bags of compost, garden mix and sand to mix up my own seed raising mix. I’ve followed Kay Baxter’s advice and I’ve combined equal parts of dirt, compost and sand (one day I dream of the dirt and compost coming from our own gardens, but right now we have mud and a stunning looking compost pile that is at least 6 months away from cooked). This combo is in one container and into another I’ve started to sieve the mix. It’s a long process, especially because the bags of soil and compost were a little damp, but the end result is a lovely fine mix that I’m really happy with. So far I have the following seeds/seedlings growing:

• Cannelloni beans (now seedlings just about ready to plant)
• Borlotti beans (just sewn)
• Slenderette beans (just sewn)
• Chinese cabbage (seedlings that I’ve now thinned out into containers for friends, they are all ready to be planted now I think)
• Rocket (yummy and ready to be planted out into the garden, I’ve also thinned them for friends)
• Another lettuce (Silvia or Silvide?)
• Mixed Basil (thai, cinnamon, lemon and purple)
• Broccoli (just sewn)

For the last little while I’ve been a little obsessed with my weaving. I’ve finished warping up the hand towels from the Ashford book of Rigid Heddle weaving, I really don’t like their cotton but I’ve stuck with it and now it’s all ready to start weaving.

One of the reasons I really don’t like this cotton (not that I’ve used much else before of course) is it has this horrible tendency to kink, which is a real pain in the butt when your trying to tension the warp. You can see in the next picture some loose warp threads already:

I’m going to attempt to tighten these with pieces of dowel or similar as I go *fingers crossed* I would like to get some other 8/2 cotton and compare them.

More importantly I’ve been having some fun warping up my countermarch loom. Before threading the heddles I used a reed from my RH loom in place of a raddle and split the warp threads into groups of 4 (1 for each shaft) and then placed these groups into a dent in the reed.

Then I proceeded to thread the heddles on each of the 4 shafts, starting from the first heddle in shaft 1 and then the 1st heddle in shaft 2 etc, tying them off into bundles of 10 as I went, when I say “bundles of 10″ I actually mean bundles of 40, 10 heddles per shaft.

Then I hung the reed from the beater holders so that it was laying horizontal just in front of the heddles. My goal was to sley 2 ends per dent (1-2 meaning, 1 end per heddle, 2 ends per dent).  Before sleying the reed I worked out how many dents I would be using, I found that I would have 12.4″ (or 124 dents ’cause I’m using a 10 dent reed) spare on each side of the reed.

I have no idea if I did this stage correctly but what I did was to take a group of 4 ends and place the end on the 1st & 2nd heddle into the first dent in the reed and the 3rd & 4th end into the second dent on the reed.

Here you can just see the 2 ends in each dent.

I proceeded in this manner all the way along, tying off groups of 5 heddles (20 ends) under the reed. I then replaced the beater onto it’s holders and placed the sleyed reed into it’s holder in the beater. 

Looking good, right? I thought so, I continued and tied the warp threads to the cloth beam.

Ok, time to get everything tensioned nicely by going to the back of the loom and patting the warp threads.

Can you see the problem in the following photo boys and girls?

That’s right, I forgot to draw the warp threads around the back beam! Idiot! But we have a solution (thank you husband mine)

Unfortunately this rod has a tendency to bow in the middle so I need to replace it with something sturdier, just not tonight. 

My next big adventure will be in getting the proper treadle tie-up working, creating a good shed and then maybe doing some actual weaving (what a novel idea). I did play with tie-up before warping the loom, there are lots of photos but I’m done with the posting for the night I think.

One of mine and Craig’s favorite things to do when we get into a bored slump in the evenings is to head into Auckland CBD, grab a good meal (usually at the Belgian Beer Cafe) and then head on over to Borders for some quality time with the books. So we did this on Saturday night, and I’m so glad we did as I have a new book called “The Big Book of Weaving” by Laila Lundell & Elisabeth Windesjo. It’s not the answer to all my prayers (those books are still on their way from Amazon) but it gave me the one itty bitty mind blowing piece of information that had alluded me about the treadle tie-up on my countermarch loom, now this is going to seem so obvious to weavers who have been playing with these things for years, but for someone who has only seen a loom used via Youtube videos this is an astounding piece of knowledge that had alluded us, it’s summed up thus:

1. Upper Lamms = Lower Heddles
2. Lower Lamms = Raise Heddles

1. Upper lamms = Black boxes on a draft
2. Black Boxes = Weft over Warp
3. Weft over Warp = Visible part of pattern (if looking @ pattern from the right side of the work)

I really wanted to get down to some weaving today, discovered that there was no easy way for me to warp up my Rigid heddle loom to do the tea towels I’ve been wanting to do for months, in the craft room, so decided to warp it up in the lounge. It was supposed to be ok, it would take me a few hours and then I’d be out of everyone’s way. That was until I discovered that when the Ashford Book of Ridid Heddle weaving says that you need 8/2 cotton white 150gm, 8/2 cotton navy 20gm for the warp it lies. My warp is 220cm long and I am just about at the end of the first cone of cotton which is a 200gm ball and I’ve only done about 53 or 198 ends I need to do! I need almost 4 balls, and that’s not including the weft thread. I had been a fan of Ashford, but I think it’s just because it’s a brand so close to home. I’m really disappointed with the DVD I got (actually I had to send the first copy back as it didn’t play), it lacked any real information and was more a promotional video then anything else, their cotton isn’t very nice to the touch, but perhaps it will be different when woven up and washed. The rigid heddle book isn’t clear and complete. It misses information about the types of yarn they use and most of them aren’t supplied by Ashford and there is no listing on where or how to get them. 

Damn it! Damn it! Damn it! I have no way of getting the cotton thread today or tomorrow, none of the shops that sell Ashford products sell this thread (or at least none of the ones open). I can get onto my usual supplier of Ashford products but then he’s not going to be able to post it till Monday so it could be Tuesday or Wednesday before I get it! So what the blazers do I do with this warp in the mean time? I can’t leave it set up in the lounge room for 3 days as it’s utalising the dinning table - apparently I can, Craig say’s we can work around it and Kain says we don’t need to eat at the table - but that’s not the point! Things just aren’t going my way today. I did attempt to spin some newspaper this morning, which was an interesting experience that I think I’d really enjoy, if I had a spinning wheel with a larger orifice, like the ones for novelty yarn spinning (which I guess this is).

Candles

I was hoping to use this for my candle bundles that Ines and I will be taking to markets, unfortunately she doesn’t like the look so we have to find something else.

And now I’m simply feeling like I’ve spent far too much time in front of my computer today and haven’t actually achieved anything *sigh*

Like Tracey, I’m supposed to write articles on this blog too, and because I’ve done this so very infrequently, I suspect that we might have amassed a following of readers interested in fibre crafts who might be a little surprised to hear me suddenly talking about the crafts that I do around the homestead, such as working with wood, leather and metal.

I’ve been working with wood for a little while, and I think Tracey has shown off some photos of some of our more useful pieces (like our bed, our shelves, etc). I’ve amassed a few large pieces of woodworking machinery, and a bunch of other useful power tools, all of which are used at the workshop at Earthsong eco-neighbourhood when I go over there. Being at the new homestead however, with a big empty shed (in the middle of a muddy paddock) has made me rethink whether I want to work wood with machines.

Like many professions, woodworking was changed dramatically before the industrial revolution. Before the advent of woodworking machinery, most woodworking trades were fairly localised. You might expect your larger local town to have a cabinet maker’s shop where the master cabinet maker and his apprentices produced much of the local furniture. Other specialised woodworking shop trades also included the chairmaker, cooper (makes barrels), wainwright (makes wagons) and wheelwright (makes wagon wheels), and outside of the shop you would also find carpenters, bodgers and lumberjacks.

With the invention of steam and then coal powered woodworking machinery it became cheeper to produce many wooden items in large factories which could afford the capital outlay that the machinery required. Many woodworkers had to find a slot in a fairly industrialised process and perform much more repetitive tasks than they were used to. Perhaps those with the most freedom to create original designs were those in the new profession of “patternmaker”, who made wooden patterns to be used to create moulds for the creation of smelted metal items. While perhaps quite a creative profession, the end result wasn’t a piece of woodwork at all, and this might have been rather disheartening.

It seems easy to argue that woodworking was a more pleasant and interesting job before these changes, a point which was the core of the Luddite movement for example, but it’s much harder to argue whether it was also better for those who weren’t woodworkers. We are now used to being able to afford new pieces of furniture for the lowest prices in history, say a day’s wages, rather than a month’s wages. This is great for the buyer, but the furniture that we buy often seems to last about five years before it ends up in the tip. We think of antique’s as something for collectors, but another way to look at an “antique” is simple a piece of furniture capable of lasting several hundred years. If we build a piece of furniture of similar quality and timeless beauty now, then it is just as precious.

Some of these thoughts came together for me when I wanted a video demonstration by Robby Pedersen from RVP-1875, a master cabinetmaker who works with the tools and techniques available to woodworkers in Iowa, USA, in 1875.

In particular it’s interesting to see the difference between Robby’s style of work, which is fun and lighthearted, but shows a strong commitment to creative work and beautiful pieces that last, however is most strongly shaped by the need to work fast enough to create furniture that people can actually afford. Every other video on modern hand tools use that I have seen is about working slowly and pedantically to achieve a greater level of perfection than even machines can provide. I’m a pedantic guy, and I love perfection, but there are other reasons for using hand tools too. One is simply that it’s more pleasant to work that way.

Here’s the video over at woodworking online. Tracey enjoyed watching it too, not because she’s a woodworker, but because she’s a history buff and likes watching a funny guy in victorian era clothes doing his thing.

For more info, see http://www.rvp1875.com/