Sources for wool kilt hose, traditional colors?

[Steve Ashton]

There is the story of a young, 14 year old boy, living in a small African village. One month of the year some Peace Corps volunteers would visit his village. They would warn the villagers how the village was dying. Drought would soon kill them and all their animals. They were offering kids scholarships to attend schools and then college in Germany. When the boy asked what he could learn, they told him of all the opportunities that could make his life better after he got his degree.

While his family could no longer afford to send him to school due to the drought the boy had always asked a lot of questions and was good at fixing stuff. But as he did not speak German and could not understand how or why someone would live somewhere where the rain fell as solid ice he did not want to go. He also felt that if the Peace Corps kids with their college degrees were telling the truth, by the time he got back in 4 or 5 years the crops would have died and blown away and his village and family would be gone.

He knew of an old guy of the hippy generation that lived 2 villages away that gave him an old Mother Earth News and he would sneak into his old school library where he found an 8th grade text book, Using Energy by Mary Atwood with a photo of wind generators on the cover.

Using a tractor fan, shock absorbers, PVC pipes, a bicycle frame and anything else he could lay his hands on, he then built a rudimentary wooden tower, plonked his home-made generator on the top, and eventually got one, and then four bulbs to light up. He is now known as "the boy who harnessed the wind"

By the time the Peace Corps came back the next year, his village had computers with the internet. The villagers could watch Netflix under electric lights at night. The crops in the village fields were irrigated with an electric pump and a well where the entire village could get clean drinking water that flowed right into their homes.

That boy, now a young man, tries to close the skills gap by traveling to other villages, on a bicycle with a cart holding old PVC pipe and old bicycle parts and teaches others how to build homemade wind powered electrical generators. He has been featured in a movie with Chiwetel Ejiofor, met Al Gore and stood on stage with Bono. Not too bad for a kid who's family could not afford to let him finish the 8th grade, and instead dug through trash heaps to find parts he could use.

[tubino]

Hi, I asked about cheap socks and inadvertently started a cool thread about sheep, wool, hand skills, the alienation of labor (but in non-Marxist terms), the value of trades, and the value of ingenuity in one's environment. That's pretty cool.

Original topic reply: I found some 80% wool kilt hose in the right bottle green for $25 US at William Glen and Sons in San Francisco. The website is worthless but the Toronto branch is better and both Paul in SF and Darren in Toronto are very helpful.