We just had a very fun project going on in the mill over the holidays that we wanted to share with everyone.  My daughter Kristen and her husband John are building a “yurt,” or “ger” to live in. A yurt is a portable, circular wood-framed structure traditionally used by Turkic nomads on the steppe, which is a cold, arid region in Central Asia and Mongolia. Here in the US we call steppes like this “the Plains” or the “prairie” but for all intents and purposes the weather and ecology are nearly identical. So it makes sense a lot of sense to take the same traditional  building that has been used since the 13th century there and transplant it here!

The yurt is a very cool lattice-walled structure – it can be warm in the deep cold, yet cool in summer. A ger (rhymes with “air”), as the Mongolians prefer to call it, is much more than a tent. The yurt has an aerodynamic shape so the wind slips over the structure with minimal resistance. The structure can collapse small enough to fit on one draft animal and can be set up again in a half an hour.  It is a self-supporting building; the frame holds its shape with no help from ropes or a stretched cover, and in all but the strongest winds the yurt will stand with nothing but gravity attaching it to the ground! According to the great Woodland Yurts website,  this rigidity is maintained by opposing forces exerted by different parts of the frame.  It really is an ingenious design.

What I find so interesting about the yurt is how it grew naturally out of the environment the Turkic nomads lived in. They had very little wood, so they built their shelters out of saplings and used fiber from their herd animals – yak, sheep, goats and camels – to make a warm and comfortable living space for themselves. The original word for “nomad” came from a word for felt, making the nomads “felt people.” The felt people’s shelters enabled them to live sustainably in harsh climates, to move easily with their herds, and raise their families in a manner that was simple, comfortable and in balance with the world around them.

Kristen and John have partially set their yurt up in the mill and it will be set up permanently in Montana. It is all hand done and they have made sheets of wool felt that will cover the sides and the roof for insulation and then a canvas cover goes over that. Valerie’s family and my family all helped on the construction, and we had a ton of fun while we did it!

We’ve also been hard at work spinning up loads of new yarn. The over-flashed bit at the very front is even more yarn that has been skeined up and is piled high on a table and waiting to be tagged. It just all looks so impressive when we lay it all out that we wanted to share a picture with you so you could see the yarn in all of its natural glory!