STORY OF HOMESPUN

Southland Times, Issue 22969, 15 August 1936, Page 16

STORY OF HOMESPUN

Romantic Tales From Ireland

(By Muriel Gahan in The Christian Science Monitor). Sea and lake were hidden, and there was nothing but the heather and the rock, and below in the valley miniature green fields with here and there a little whitewashed cottage. It was here we found our homespun. Here, in the heart of the mountains, the women were spinning their wool as they had been for the last hundreds of years, and men were weaving on the same looms their fathers had used, and their fathers, and their fathers before them. We met two of the women on the road. When they heard what we were looking for, they brought us into their house, and told us the way of it. The Way of It. The sheep are shorn in May. Those tough, little, mountainy, black-faced, black-legged sheep that swarm over the hills, whose voice on a still day is the loneliest thing in that lonely land. In Shrahmore—for that is the name of this hidden valley—there are, too, some flocks of Cheviots. Theirs is a “kind” wool, the women told us. It adds a softness to the yarn that the mountainy wool lacks. During the summer the women gather their dyes. The gray lichen off the rocks—“crottle” in the north, but “the moss” they called it here—for those wonderful shades, ranging from tawny orange to deep red brown, with that never-to-be-forgotten rich homespun smell. Heather for yellow, bracken for green, elderberry for purple—-there is hardly a flower or berry that does not give some colour. Colours are got, too, from the roots and bark of trees, and even from the bog holes. “The mud,” they told us, “is grand for the black.”

All these vegetable dyes give soft, beautiful colours, like the rocks and the bog, and the mountain where they grow. Indigo is the v cry colour of the sky. It was really because of indigo that we were here. We had seen a coat of this lovely blue homespun on a friend, and she had told us where it had come from. The Fairy Dyer. We asked now who did the indigo, and the woman directed us across the valley to a tiny cottage half buried in whins and rushes. Near by, a little river tumbled down the mountain side, and we found her there, washing her wool. Some of it was spread out to dry on the whins, like a great ragged sheep caught in the bushes. We knew she was a fairy when we saw her. Unlike the other women, she was dressed in a shawl and a scarlet petticoat with a white cloth tied around her head. Her face, rosy red, was seamed with a thousand wrinkles and smiles ran out of her eyes and round her mouth. When she spoke her voice echoed down the valley. She was not five feet high. She brought us back to her cottage, and, barefooted, she danced rather than walked along beside us, telling us about her flock of lovely white Cheviots, and the soft wool she got from them to Spin her yarn. The indigo was hard come by now, she said, but not long since she had found a lump of it in the roof, and it had stood by her till now. Looking up at the roof, shining black as ebony through the mysterious wreathing blue of the turf smoke, we would have felt no surprise at anything coming out of it. The Carder. A girl was carding wool in the chimney corner. “A neighbour,” the fairy said, and proudly she showed us photographs from London of her own daughters. Two lovely girls, with a handsome young man apiece. No, they never- came back to Shrahmore now. Sure, why would they? On the fire a black, three-legged pot

was boiling. It was wool being dyed with the moss. The house was filled with the smell of it. This dye needs no mordant, but most vegetable dyes must be used with alum or some chemical to fix the colour. “The neighbour” showed us the carders. They were like two square, flat-backed hair brushes with short, wire bristles. After dyeing, the wool is dried, then teased and carded. Carding is hard, tedious work, she told us. The wool is drawn between the carders and made into soft rolls ready for spinning. It is the big spinning wheels they use here. The spinner walks backward and forward, twirling the wool between her fingers. In Donegal they use the small flax wheels. The work is done sitting at the wheel, and the wool can be spun much more finely than on these others.

The fairy took down from a beam a huge ball of yarn she had just spun. It was beautifully fine and strong in spite of the big wheel. It was being sent off the next day to the weaver, four miles over the mountain. One weaver can do the work for from 10 to 15 spinners, she told us. if he is a good worker he will do over 20 yards in two days, whereas it will have taken her three weeks to prepare that amount of yarn. After being woven, the tweed goes back again to the spinner, and she washes it and shrinks it, and rolls it ready for sale. The shrinking is done by leaving the tweed out on a wall and letting the sun and rain do their best.

We understood now the important part the women take in making a piece of homespun. Nine tenths of the work is theirs. There is, of course, good weaving and bad weaving, but it is the dyeing and spinning that makes the real difference between a good and a bad homespun. We said good-bye to out fairy at last, and we carried away with us the sound of her voice, as she sped up the mountain calling to her white sheep. The Land of Spinners. We came to Donegal in the early autumn, over miles of purple brown bog, with Errigal rising like a spear in the distance. It was when we got to the blue lake at the foot of Errigal that we knew we had reached the land of the spinners; a splash of scarlet on a gray xvall, the steady whirr of a wheel coming from an open door; Dunlewey, the heart of the Donegal homespun country. Here every woman spins, and there is work in this one district for three if not four weavers. In the last few years, great strides have been made in the homespun industry in Donegal. Girls and young men have been apprenticed to older spinners and weavers. Spinning competitions have been held, and the women have been encouraged to keep record books of their dye plants and colours. They experiment with every kind of flower; one woman showed us many beautiful shades of red ranging from the softest pink that she had got using different mordants with the fuchsia that grows there in hedges all along the roadside. It is always in mountain districts that homespun is found. The mountain people, cut off from the rest of the world, have had to spin and weave to clothe themselves and their children and so the homespun has survived. It is here, too, that the Irish language has survived; it is the speech of their everyday life. These people are of the kindest in the world, and one of the most industrious, but they are living a hundred years too late. They are at the mercy of a world governed by advertising slogans and quick sale returns. Unable to go in search oi a market, they are dependent on the trade that /tops at their door; a letter with a chance order, a passing tourist, and many of them live off the beaten track of tourists.