Elizabeth Zimmerman’s 3rd Rule of How much wool shall I buy?:
“Buy too much wool.”
Month: February 2016
“Do you know there’s dog fur in your freezer?”
~ and other examples of living with a fiber addict
This was the question asked by a concerned house guest last week.
By now, My Guy is more than accustomed to my strange ways with wool. Yarn hanging from the shower curtain or draped over radiators? A metal mixing bowl filled with fleece and suds sitting on the floor of the bathtub? Bits of fleece scattered on the rocker on the front porch, plastic wrapped roving in the top rack of the dish washer with the cups and bowls? He doesn’t even blink anymore; and, more importantly, he knows not to move anything resembling wool unless it’s cold.
Last week, while our musician friends were visiting, and in between rehearsals for our live recording, I managed to get a good amount of work done on some fiber projects. Part of what I did was go through my stash – and I found several ziplock bags of saved Chien fiber (i.e. dog hair) that I wanted to spin during the Iditarod coming up in a couple weeks. We’ve never remotely had any bug issues (knock on wood); but it’s dog fur, and I’m squitchy about anything potentially crawly in my yarn – even just stink bugs (ew). So even though I’d already washed it, dried it, and sealed it in plastic over a year ago: into the freezer it went, for good measure. Later this week, our cuddly fur-baby’s shed coat will be scoured again, dried, and blended with wool. All of this, I was more than happy to explain to our house guests when they found baggies of dog fur next to the ice cubes. They took it pretty well, really, all the while looking like they expected me to get to a punchline at any minute.
To those not part of the fiber world, spinning is probably strange enough. While dog hair yarn is becoming more and more commonplace inside the spinning circle – and is now even available to knitters in small commercially produced batches, although I can’t remember the name of the vendor I found at Rhinebeck – I doubt Chiengora clothing is going to hit the mainstream anytime soon. Still, I’m happy for the chance to get people wondering about what their clothes are made from, and where that material comes from. Even if I am cutting a record with those people, and they’re staying in my fiber festooned house. Even if they do stop using the frosted beer mugs from the freezer.
This week’s flowers are musicians
Crafting dance steps, meals, and friendship
Instead of flowers, friends arrived on Tuesday. We immediately set about making merry with our house guests, who most recently hail from California via Boston, and Virginia via New Orleans. There was dancing, there was drinking, there was cooking, there was chatting. After two long, intense, all-hours days of practice and playing, on Thursday evening we recorded a live album in the upstairs venue of a local pub.
Next week, we’ll get back to our regularly scheduled flower photos. Right now, I’m going to go catch up on a lot of missed sleep!
I’ll keep it, just in case…
Rooting through the stash, and an unexpected detour through the past
As someone who loves to create in a variety of different mediums, I find myself constantly on the lookout for potentially useful materials. Whether it’s wandering through an old-fashioned hardware store, strolling down the beach, or investigating the stalls at a fiber or wood-working show, at the end of the day I usually discover I’ve accumulated some sort of cache of materials. Some of these I give to other crafters, some I put to use immediately, and some I keep for a rainy day. This last, is where I run into problems.
I once read that you should have nothing in your house that is not beautiful or useful. However, when you find beauty in the light from the lamp, and potential use in the shell on the beach, it becomes much more difficult to ever let anything slip through your fingers. You can easily see the day when you will need exactly that thing, and instead of having to go find it, you’ll already have it! Great! At a certain point though, all that stored potential gets a little overwhelming, both in physical mass, and in possibilities. When I look at my collection and see that even living under a waterfall for the rest of my life would not create sufficient rainy days to make possible the use of what I have, I try to turn off my sentimentality, and spend a day or two sorting and de-stashing.
Enter the next hurdle: the endless shifting around of piles. My guy and I are both pile-ers. We very neatly and succinctly organize ourselves vertically and then laterally; in that order. Combined into one household, our rooms exude something akin to an 1800’s curiosity cabinet, only without all the neatly partitioned little trays.
So when I sort through my stash of materials, usually what I end up with is more piles, even if I get rid of a lot of what I had. This can be a little frustrating.
In a lot of creative blogs, I see beautiful photos of very Zen-like, modern studios, with tools and materials spaciously laid out on mostly empty shelves, dozens of project swatches all in the same color family, and small, neatly organized workspaces that remind me of a spa. In project photos from these studios, it looks as if the gently used, softly coiled tape measure was only just, carefully, removed from it’s very own drawer.
These photos, beautiful as they are, always make me panic. I can only hope that a lot of time is spent impeccably staging them for their intended audience, like a window display. I can’t help but imagine the rest of the shelf contents piled in the unseen corner of the room, until after the photo is taken! Because when I need to measure something, I’m lucky if I can even find my measuring tape, i.e. remember when I last used it, and where I set it down.
This week, while sorting and de-stashing, I found some priceless personal relics of years gone by, mixed in with all the paint and beads and wool. I immediately got sidetracked. Family photos that I didn’t know I had, of long gone loved ones; earrings and pins and antique bags with sentimental value from previous generations; a single sheet torn from a college notebook with a birthday note from a good friend – and more. I laughed; I cried; I smiled; I sighed. It took me hours to go through what I found. Yes, I put a lot of these relics into the “it goes” pile. But, despite the still unorganized mess surrounding me, I decided that holding on to those few belongings that had meaning for me, that made me smile, was okay; even if that was their only use. As for all the useful “it goes” things that are now finding other homes – around the bend is always something else. This year, I’m trying to recalibrate how I view my stash – not as what I keep and have at hand immediately, but what I find inspiration in at the moment, and what I imagine I can make of what I find.
Whenever my guy gets flowers, he asks the florist not to wrap them, because he usually takes them right home and puts them in a vase, and doesn’t want to waste all that material. Today though, I am on vacation! and we went to lunch together at the market next to the flower shop. So, to protect the flowers (and to make certain it didn’t look like we were making off with some part of a display!), today’s flowers were wrapped – beautifully, I might add.