Christine English discusses the Fibre Rats and Northern Spinners groups.

Christine English discusses the Fibre Rats and Northern Spinners groups.

Shaelagh Cull

Christine English

Zoom

One of the big advantages for me of the Guild was that it got me out among other women with some common interests. And most of my friendships over the years have been with Guild members and because we've, I've lived kind of remote from Kingston itself, when we moved, I've been in three different farms over this time. One was in Marlbank, where I started then I was near Odessa for seven years and then in 2002, spring of 2002, we moved out to the Enterprise area. So I had different people that I carpooled with from the Odessa area and the Enterprise area, but the Enterprise area group, we ended up starting something we call the Northern Spinners and we would sometimes have meetings between Guild meetings or instead of Guild meetings more locally. We would have a spinning day once a month and get together. Suzanne Clark, at least two different summers had a dye day at her cottage and we did some dyeing and she would do a big indigo vat and we could bring stuff and dye it. Yeah, it was mostly once a month get together. And then that morphed over a number of years as we lost some members and gained some new ones with other sort of fibre interests into something now called the Fibre Rats. And it's still is my main social outlet. And it's morphed over the years. Stefania Dignum was the Icelandic sheep producer was a member of it, initially, before the Fibre Rats, the Northern Spinners one, and she passed away. And now Suzanne's gone. So we've we've, you know, we've lost some members over the years, but it's it's been a really wonderful supportive group to be part of. There's always been Kingston Guild members in it. And the original one the Northern Spinners was all guild members, I think at that time. Nancy Bowman is very active, she's the one that organized the Zoom meetings all year. Beth Abbot is one of the Fibre Rats and she's very active in the Guild. Norma Rosier, she's one of the Fibre Rats. So yeah, there's very active guild participation in this Fibre Rats group. The Fibre Rats tends to have people from even further north, up Parham area, the Westport area, quite a ways away. There's also a knitters group and so some of them from the knitters group have also joined the spinners or vice versa. But most of the people in the group now, I think about half of them, I think are actually still Guild members or Guild members and about half aren't. Some of them are members of the what is it that up near Perth, there's a school, an old school house that's been turned into fibre arts center, and some of them are part of that group. So there are these tendrils that go through the wider fibre community. For me, that's really been part of being part of the Guild was getting me to know these people in the first place and then some of those relationships have morphed otherwise.