Shepherdess Shares Lifelong Love of Fiber Arts | The Heart of the Farm is the Family | lancasterfarming.com

2022-07-23 02:15:53 By : Mr. Hooke Zhao

Bankert throws the shuttle as she weaves hand-spun yarns on her rigid heddle loom.

Joyce Bankert in her kitchen in York County, Pa., with a large shawl made of dark, natural Corriedale sheep’s wool that is just one of her current projects. The small, green item at left is a child’s hat of dyed wool.

Among the fiber items crafted by Bankert are on her table, counterclockwise from upper left, a cowl, or infinity scarf, a blue-green mixed color shawl, dried, home-grown indigo for dyeing wool, and dryer balls made from recycled woolen fabric.

Photos by Joyce Bupp With 30 years of experience on her Rick Reeves oak spinning wheel, Joyce Bankert makes the skilled craft of fashioning wool roving into yarn look easy.

As a 4-H fiber club leader, Joyce Bankert helped to teach members related skills, like dyeing wool with Kool-Aid for bright colors. From left are wools dyed with cherry, orange and grape drink powders.

Bankert fashioned these dryer balls, for tumbling in a dryer with wet garments, by recycling a thrift-shop woolen vest.

Bankert throws the shuttle as she weaves hand-spun yarns on her rigid heddle loom.

RED LION, Pa. — It’s often said that what one learns as a child stays for life.

Such is the case with shepherdess Joyce Bankert, whose childhood exposure to the crafting skills practiced by her mother and grandmother developed into a love of creating with fiber.

Joyce and her husband, Mike, are well-known among the area’s sheep breeders and exhibitors. They’ve competed at shows for years with the flock they’ve maintained at their Red Lion home in southern York County.

While Mike grew up working with the flocks kept by his parents, Preston and Colleen Bankert, livestock was not part of Joyce’s early years. But her family’s zest for creativity took root with Joyce at an early age.

“We were a ‘crafting’ family. My grandmother, Grace Motter, crocheted everything,” she fondly recalled, adding that her grandmother was so fast at crocheting that it was a bit hard for a novice to follow. Her mother, Norma Mann, preferred embroidery and knitting, skills which Joyce also soon mastered.

Joyce Bankert in her kitchen in York County, Pa., with a large shawl made of dark, natural Corriedale sheep’s wool that is just one of her current projects. The small, green item at left is a child’s hat of dyed wool.

“In junior high, I took home-ec, and my focus through the rest of school was on sewing,” she said. Her seamstress skills became so polished that she designed and made her own wedding gown.

As a newlywed farm wife, Joyce soon began helping with the sheep, especially assisting with bottle-feeding lambs. It seemed only natural that, with sheep a significant part of their family life, Joyce’s crafting talents would embrace the use of wool.

Now, many years later, the couple’s rural home overflows with examples of Joyce’s love of fiber creativity and of the sheep that supply her materials of choice. A spare room dedicated to her fiber art includes her prized Rick Reeves oak-made spinning wheel, which she has had since 1990.There is also the more recent addition of a New Zealand-made weaving loom, acquired about a year ago, and totes and closets stocked with fiber arts supplies.

As the Bankert children, Drew, Emily and Eric, grew up and became involved in 4-H activities, they joined the lamb 4-H club. Drew and Eric both leaned toward raising meat-breed sheep, but Emily (now Emily Russell) preferred the wool breeds. Her grandfather, Preston, purchased for Emily two natural-colored Corriedales, a breed with fleece shades that range from gray to deep brown and black.

Photos by Joyce Bupp With 30 years of experience on her Rick Reeves oak spinning wheel, Joyce Bankert makes the skilled craft of fashioning wool roving into yarn look easy.

Joyce later added a flock of white Corriedales to expand their fleece coloration variety.

When her mother-in-law retired as leader of the local Winterstown-Felton community club, Joyce stepped up to take her place. As a break-off of the community club, Joyce and fellow crafting enthusiast, Debbie Mancuso, started a fiber-arts 4-H club, introducing members to a variety of related arts and crafts. As a club leader, Joyce continued to expand her knowledge and skills in fiber creativity.

She continues to use one project experimented with by the 4-H’ers. As fiber club members learned, the vibrant colors of powdered Kool-Aid drink mixes make excellent dyeing materials for processed wool. Joyce also experiments with various natural material dyes, including onion skins and indigo, a plant she is currently growing for its prized blue and purple dye shades. Natural dye colors are “set,” or stabilized for permanence, with the addition of acid mordants, such as white vinegar.

As a 4-H fiber club leader, Joyce Bankert helped to teach members related skills, like dyeing wool with Kool-Aid for bright colors. From left are wools dyed with cherry, orange and grape drink powders.

Participation in shows has taken the family from the York Fair to the Pennsylvania Farm Show, and to the Maryland Sheep and Wool festival. Emily and Joyce each had a show string of about eight head, enough each to be able to show in group classes for wool sheep. They were able to raise their wool sheep separately from the meat flock.

After their children had grown and moved away, the couple downsized their flock numbers, and now focus on raising meat sheep. But, through a network of friends, fellow sheep exhibitors, and participation in several fiber-arts groups, from local to online international, Joyce finds plentiful sources for supplies, instructions and ideas to spur whatever next fiber project she has in mind.

“Mike says that buying me a fleece occasionally for my projects is more cost-effective than raising them,” Joyce said about one of her current sources of raw wool. Sometimes, the wool is acquired through auctions that are often held following shearing or fleece competitions. Recently, a friend shared with her some llama wool that she plans to incorporate into some upcoming fiber projects.

While some fiber artists clean and process their own raw fleeces prior to spinning it into yarns, commercial processers offer a mechanized alternative to what can be a tedious and time-consuming task when done by hand.

“Processing aligns the wool fibers to make it easier to spin,” Joyce said.

The processed fleeces are returned as roving, with the fibers having been straightened, slightly twisted and ready to be spun into yarn, or utilized in other wool crafts.

In addition to the numerous knitted items she creates with her hand-spun yarns, Joyce is also now incorporating them into projects while she hones her weaving skills on her 24-inch Ashford rigid heddle loom. Her first woven project, however, wasn’t fashioned from wool yarn, but from 4-ply cotton thread. She created a pair of yellow-and-green woven dish towels as a gift for their daughter’s birthday, to complement Emily’s John Deere-themed kitchen décor.

Among the fiber items crafted by Bankert are on her table, counterclockwise from upper left, a cowl, or infinity scarf, a blue-green mixed color shawl, dried, home-grown indigo for dyeing wool, and dryer balls made from recycled woolen fabric.

To further master weaving skills, Joyce is enrolled in an upcoming two-day class at Red Stone Glen Fiber Arts shop in northern York County. The fiber-arts store and school is one of her frequent go-to sources for various supplies. A wide array of fiber-craft related supplies and kits are also available from online sources

As a member of several online fiber arts groups, some domestic and some international, Joyce shares her skills and knowledge with others, while fielding ideas and tips from a wide-ranging membership group of similar interests.

“With the online Wool and Fiber Arts group (WAFA), you can pick up new things and teaching ideas,” she says of the group, into which one must apply and be accepted in order to participate. “It’s a way of being helpful to one another.”

“Once a year we have a challenge to do the ‘Tour De Fleece,’ at the same time the famed bike-race Tour de France is underway. Several challenges are issued during that 30-day period, with prizes awarded to those who accomplish the most teaching activities,” Joyce said. In the public awareness and education effort of the tour, members are asked to demonstrate and participate in activities that promote the fiber arts and then post online photos of those they’ve completed.

“I did a spinning demonstration at Perrydell Farms, a local dairy store,” Joyce said of one public-teaching event. She’s won a variety of fiber-craft-related awards for the activities she’s undertaken during her years as a “tour” participant.

One of Joyce’s most dedicated “giving back” fiber-related activities is the Prayer Shawl ministry she organized and leads at St. Paul Hametown Lutheran Church, Glen Rock, where the couple hold membership.

Bankert fashioned these dryer balls, for tumbling in a dryer with wet garments, by recycling a thrift-shop woolen vest.

As their children grew older, Joyce began York College classes in 2001, studying behavioral sciences and gerontology. She finished her studies at McDaniel College in Westminster, Maryland, earning a master of science degree in the study of aging. After two additional years of pastoral studies at the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Gettysburg, she took a position with the Lutheran Home in Shrewsbury. Currently, she is employed as the full-time recreational therapist at the rehab and nursing care facility of Rest Haven, York, where she can also combine pastoral care. She also sometimes incorporates her crafting and fiber skills into activities for the 100-plus residents.

During her clinical pastoral education, Joyce was performing studies and service with the Christiana Care Health System in Delaware. At one point while she was there, she became ill.

“My supervisor wrapped me in a prayer shawl and our small group laid hands on me and prayed over me. That’s an experience I will never forget,” Joyce says. “I fell in love with that idea, to take knitting to a whole new level to give of myself to others.”

“I enjoy the process of taking raw wool to a finished product,” she adds. “But it does take lots of time to get from beginning to end.”

All in all, though, for Joyce Bankert, creating from the all-natural wool isn’t about the time. It’s about a labor of love.

Professional sheep shearer Dan Dailey's personal and familial history of shearing is as impressive as his collection of antique shearing tools. 

The winning woven product of the chocolate-themed sheep-to-shawl competition at the 2022 Pennsylvania Farm Show in Harrisburg looked good enough to eat.

Joyce Bupp is a freelance writer in York County, Pennsylvania.

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