We like the environment.

I would wager to say that almost every action we take is coupled with the thoughts, “How will this contribute to our ecological footprint?  What are the lasting repercussions?”  Our family re-uses whatever we can, we make the choice to get “new-to-us” items rather than buying something brand new, and we prefer to walk or ride bikes just about everywhere (still trying to figure out how we’re going to load up the bike trailers with all the gear we need to go camping with two babies…)

Sometimes we trap ourselves in a little box of eco-perfection, when we feel like we can’t do anything without disrupting the flow of the entire natural world.

Sigh.

When I process wool, it comes to me in raw form.  That means that someone gave a sheep a haircut, put all the wool in a bag, and then delivered what some would consider a greasy, stinky, filthy parcel to my open, outstretched arms.  Personally, I think raw fleece is lovely–rich with lanolin and touches of mother nature (aka:  hay)–but I understand that most folks prefer a tamer version of this beautiful fiber.  That’s cool with me.

So I wash the wool in a special way, pick through it to remove all of the bits of mother nature (hay), comb it to remove the weakened sun-damaged fibers (it is hair after all), and then card it into little blobs called rolags in order to make it easy to spin.  Someday I will show you pictures of this process, but I think I was talking about the environment today.  I get a little sidetracked when I start thinking about wool.  Sorry.

After the combing, there are a few mounds of hay-ey, crappy little bits left over.  I could spin these up to weave into rugs, but I like to leave them outside for birdies to snatch up as nesting material.  Because I’m nice and I figure birds like to be warm too.

Enter the eco-terrorist that lives inside my mind:

“What kind of effect will this have on the populations of birds?”

“What if a particular species gathers the wool, stays warmer than it should, refuses to fly south for the winter, and then dies because of this wool?”

I’m serious.  This is the kind of crap that I think about.

So the other day I was taking the kiddos around for a stroll and happened upon a fallen branch, a casualty of the windstorm from the previous evening.  And I found this:

You might notice that big hunk of plastic in the front of the nest there.  And the bits of wool that I threw out into the yard earlier this summer.  I think I’ll take my chances with providing the sweet birdies with wool.