Rage!

How do you represent an emotion in a tangible way?   At my last spinning guild meeting we had an exercise to help us expand our creativity.  We listed a few nouns and then came up with adjectives to describe them.  Our challenge was to pick one of the nouns and then spin yarn that represented it.  I spun “ice cream” - vanilla, my favorite flavor, with chocolate chunks, mint and strawberry for added color.  This was a very timely exercise since I was in the process of trying to deal with a bit of anger that I had been feeling for the past few days.  So, I decided that I would spin anger!  What does anger look like?  Anger is powerful so bright fiery reds, oranges and yellows were my color choices.   To the colored wools I added some gold tinsel to feel like lightning striking in all its power.  Not good enough!  I stripped the seams out of a red silk tie belonging to the person who my anger was directed to and ran my rotary cutter over it until it was only shreds.  Then I ran all of my representations of anger through my drum carder to make a batt to spin from.   The finished product – a skein of rage.  Makes me smile to look at it gracing my coffee table and calms me when I feel the anger surfacing again.

Angora, Silk and Cormo Wool

This was at times an experiment in terror but I love the end result!  I received some angora fur from a friend some time ago and didn’t get to working with it because it needed quite a bit of work.  It took a lot of combing and in the end I still had lumps but decided to give it a spin anyway.  I blended it with super soft cormo wool, spun and plied it.  I didn’t end up with a lot of yardage but knitted up what I had – my scarf was a little short.  I had about 40 yards of silk from a spinning guild meeting where we had a technique session on spinning silk.  I didn’t want to take the chance of the silk being limp so I spun up some more cormo and plied it with the silk.  Then there came choosing the knitting pattern.  I’m not a fantastic knitter but I find that difficulty is based more on concentration than the pattern.  I sure picked the wrong pattern!  After many start overs I chose a different pattern and this is the finished scarf.  A final go around with a crochet stitch with the silk gave it a nice finish.