How to Warm Up

If you are cold, putting on a sweater can be a good idea. First, go to a sheep farm and find two sheeps that like one another. Wait until there is a pregnancy and adopt the resulting baby sheep. It’s a ewe for you. While you’re taking care of your new baby sheep, start working on the other things you will need for your sweater. Knitting needles can be made of bamboo, wood, metal or even plastic. The plastic ones will be the most difficult to make because you’ll need to find some polymer and shape it into the needles. Metal might be just as hard to mine and smelt, so wood will be easy. Unless you have bamboo, which can grow wild and be a problem in lots of places unless your problem is that you don’t have wood to make your knitting needles. Sharpen the ends of the wood, but don’t make them too sharp or you will put holes in your sweater, meaning holes other than the neck and waist and wrist holes.

Now, learn to knit if you don’t already know how. Again, this is a good thing to do while you are caring for your baby sheep. Books can teach you how to knit well. Get one of those. Pele’s New Suit advised learning to weave to make cloth for clothes, but you need to be much more skilled to make a loom. Making knitting needles is easier. Oh, but spinning is needed, too. Don’t forget to learn how to spin. You might be imagining the big spinning wheel, but there’s a little hand spinning thing you can do that’s less difficult to build.

So now you have knitting needles and a sheep and spinning equipment. Time to shear the sheep. Be careful. Sheep don’t like this process. It makes them cold. They may kick you. Once you have the wool off your sheep, wash it well and get to work spinning. Use the yarn to knit your sweater. If you don’t have enough yarn to make a sweater, meaning perhaps your sheep was not big enough, get another sheep.

There are other ways to get warm. You can grow flax and then process it somehow and make it into linen thread. This is a confusing and mysterious process, that may involve magic. Flax grows from flax seeds, which are popular in smoothies. Don’t make a smoothie. They will make you colder than you are already.

You can grow cotton, as well. Cotton takes a lot of water to grow, so you may need to dig a well. The work of digging the well will be hard work and make you sweat. That could get you warm and then you wouldn’t need to plant, grow, process, spin and knit the cotton. You also wouldn’t have met your sheep, and that might be disappointing. Shaun the Sheep is a favorite sheep, though he is of course fictional and can’t be sheared.

Blankets can make you warm, as can fires and running. Or moving to a warm place like a jungle or a tropical island. Moving to get warm is a longstanding tradition, but it’s much more complicated than learning to knit, the proof being that early humans migrated from place to place many centuries before they knew how to knit. If you decide to move to a warm place to get warm, you need to sell your house, choose your new location, get a new job there, and then make friends. You will also need to decide what to do with your sheep, whether she will come with you or stay home. She would rather stay home, especially if you got a second sheep to produce more wool to knit a sweater to get warm.