A large kettle of yarn to attend upon. Lucretia and self rinse our through many waters, get out, dry, attend to, bring in, do up and sort 110 score of yarn, this with baking and ironing.Went to hackling flax.Rose early to help Ruth warp and put a piece in the loom.Baking and hackling yarn. A long web of tow to whiten and weave.
A large kettle of yarn to attend upon. Lucretia and self rinse our through many waters, get out, dry, attend to, bring in, do up and sort 110 score of yarn, this with baking and ironing.
Went to hackling flax.
Rose early to help Ruth warp and put a piece in the loom.
Baking and hackling yarn. A long web of tow to whiten and weave.
The wringing out of this linen yarn was most exhausting, and the rinsing in various waters was no simple matter in those days, for the water did not conveniently run into the houses through pipes and conduits, but had to be laboriously carried in pailfuls from a pump, or more frequently raised in a bucket from a well.
I am always touched, when handling the homespun linens of olden times, with a sense that the vitality and strength of those enduring women, through the many tedious and exhausting processes which they had bestowed, were woven into the warp and woof with the flax, and gave to the old webs of linen their permanence and their beautiful texture. How firm they are, and how lustrous! And how exquisitely quaint and fineare their designs; sometimes even Scriptural designs and lessons are woven into them. They are, indeed, a beautiful expression of old-time home and farm life. With their close-woven, honest threads runs this finer beauty, which may be impalpable and imperceptible to a stranger, but which to me is real and ever-present, and puts me truly in touch with the life of my forbears. But, alas, it is through intuition we must learn of this old-time home life, for it has vanished from our sight, and much that is beautiful and good has vanished with it.
The associations of the kitchen fireside that linger in the hearts of those who are now old can find no counterpart in our domestic surroundings to-day. The welcome cheer of the open fire, which graced and beautified even the humblest room, is lost forever with the close gatherings of the family, the household occupations, the homespun industries which formed and imprinted in the mind of every child the picture of a home.