Sylvia Currie on Qiviut

Sylvia Currie on Qiviut

Jung-Ah Kim

Sylvia Currie

Phone

If we go back to my trip up to the Arctic, and with the qiviut, we went out on the fields, and we just picked up because the muskox shed their fleece. And we were just picking it up off the ground. And we would bring it in. And the lady who led the workshop showed us how we didn't actually card it the way you would card a sheep's fleece. We just sort of pulled it apart and pulled out the stuff from the weeds and the growth that had grown into it, and then spun it by hand. And I, at this point, we stopped for lunch. And so I put my spinning, I always do this when I'm spinning. I put a brake on it; something to hold it so it won't unspin and I did this. I put a weight on the spinning. And when I came back the weight had been taken away and the instructor said, No, you just let the fleece do what it wants. And so that was the lesson I learned in how to work with qiviut.