In a beautiful collaborative moment a collection of growers and makers from Pittsburgh will be fashioning together a 100% Pennsylvania grown baseball. 2 different weights of flax, a lighter one from our farm, and a heavier one from John Paul’s Farm (Armagh, Pa), will be hand spun from custom carved wooden flax spindles made by Pace Nalbone, weighted with cast brass weights (adorned with little flax seeds and flowers) by Guinevere Marrow, to be spun into yarn by a team of community members, to be wound into a ball and wrapped in deer leather handmade by Cheech, and finally stitched together with more flax yarn and dyed red with our farm’s madder plants.

The big gist is to display the pre-homogenization moment of an every day object who was originially, like all things, an expression of the farm, place, and community: the ball of yarn from a time when people grew their own clothes, leftover scraps of leather, etc. Before a baseball was a standardized infinite clone it was as varied as whoever made it, with the story going that the “home team” was in charge of making/ bringing the ball. The final baseball will be at the Pittsburgh County Fair for everyone to give a toss.