Litha. Midsummer. Solstice.
I celebrated the holiday by participating in the local Scandinavian Midsummer Festival. I recently joined the local Viking reenactment group, Reik Felag, and I was part of their living history Viking trading village at the festival. I spun yards and yards of wool with a drop spindle and chatted with people about how the Vikings, and well, the world, made thread and yarn for the thousands of years before the spinning wheel was invented. The Vikings may have only been a significant presence for several hundred years, a little over a thousand years ago, but spinning goes back to before the first written records.
Ever since humans evolved less body hair, we have needed clothing to keep us warm in the cold and to protect our skin from the elements. Spinning plant and animal hair fibers provides us with thread which we can then weave to make cloth, which is then sewn into fabric. It’s a lot of work, and I always find it interesting, when doing things of this sort, just how many people never seem to have thought about how clothing is produced. I suppose it’s because I like to make things (particularly textile things) and so I want to know where things come from and how they are made.
At any rate, I spent a couple of days outdoors, dressed like a Viking, spinning wool in the rain.
Summer has arrived with a vengeance in the last week or so. Sunshine, heat, a bit of a breeze. I’m knitting a sweater for Eowyn for our upcoming camping trip, and doing my best not to lose it after being in a car accident. We’re all fine, but it was unpleasant, and it was my fault, and I’m more than a little freaked out about the whole thing.
I got home after the accident last night to find the delivery slip for this:
This season’s Wheel of the Year swap on Ravelry is about sharing your own practice. I sent off a package about my nature-centred practice, and received one from a polytheist who works with the Greek pantheon. Her upcoming celebration, closest to Midsummer, is for Kronos, as the god of the grain. She sent me some stuff for a mini altar, a prayer, a lovely ball of wool, and a necklace. It arrived at the right time, when I needed cheering up. Good timing indeed.
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