[Sca-cooks] OT felting

[Jennifer Thompson]

> Stefan replied ...
>
> I'm glad you found it interesting. I'm never sure if such mentions of
> the various Florilegium files will help or fall below someone's
> experience level.

Part of my problem is that I don't lurk well. 8-) I tend to want to jump in
and toss my opinion/experience into the ring and when the conversation in
question took place two years ago, that's a bit, well, odd.

> > cannot imagine devoting the time and effort that a yurt would take.
>
> Yes, but many of us can't imagine constantly walking around with a
> distaff and drop spindle to make the thread needed to spin all their
> cloth either.

Like your example with the Mongols making felt *while* riding, it's
something that was done in period, but I wouldn't do on weekends. Keeping a
spindle to hand while watching the kids play is one thing, trying to spin
enough to clothe my family on weekends and nights while working a 40 hour
week away from home ... ain't gonna happen.

> a bag of uncleaned, uncombed wool ... my wife had thrown it away, for some
reason. :-)

For those who don't work with fiber, uncleaned wool contains not only the
natural lanolin (animal oil) but also vegetable matter (a loose term for
stuff sheep walk around in) in varying amounts. Some shepherds make little
coats for their sheep to wear to keep vm to a minimum. After a couple of
months, an uncleaned fleece (depending on just how unclean it was) could be
hmmm, how to put this politely... not identifiable as useful material by the
untrained eye. I'd still be distressed at the loss of a fleece, though.

okay, obligatory food content -- on the Ethiopian food thread, I've skimmed
a few sites for Ethiopian recipes and can't find anything that looks like
the chicken we remember. Perhaps it was a specialty of the house and we
happened to eat at the same restaurant?