Wedding Dress Transformed

My good friend Miriam’s wedding shower is tomorrow and I just finished her gift. She had her mother’s winter wedding dress transformed into a spring dress for her upcoming June wedding and she gave me the extra parts. From the pieces I made a ring bearer pillow, a clutch and a tissue cover. This is the second time I’ve had the opportunity to reconstruct from a wedding dress and I have to say, there’s honor in being able to work with fabric that holds such special memories. I’ve always held in higher regard items that have been used and valued in someone else’s life. They can be anything from fabric to furniture to kitchen equipment or to a special pet’s fur. They send me daydreaming, maybe into history or into a life that’s just different from mine.

Earth Day

While I knew that Earth Day was today it didn’t really hit me to do something about it until Google automatically took me to a search of Earth Day. (Could have also been my possessed computer clicking at random as it does.) Every day is Earth Day for me, sometimes by choice and sometimes by necessity. At $3.50 a bag for garbage collection I’m inclined to do as much recycling and reusing as I can.

Today starts the Easter weekend holiday so I my daughter will be home soon from college – I posed the question to her – what should we do for earth day? “Aren’t you supposed to plant a tree?” It’s too rainy to dig a hole today so I decided to save a tree. Feeling the “need” for a new purse lately I decided to spin yarn from newspaper to knit one. Spinning paper has been a “to do challenge” in my mind for some time now so why not today? I should be able to knit up a nice handbag from my yarn – and then I can figure out how to keep the ink from rubbing on to my clothes.

On with the yarn! I picked out a few of the most colorful pages from yesterday’s newspaper and cut a few strips to try. Too heavy! And the join that I usually used to connect my plastic bag strips was making impossible lumps in the newspaper. The yarn was stiff and clumpy and wouldn’t feed onto my bobbin. I cut strips about half the width and joined them end to end with a spot of glue. While it made for a nicer yarn I still had to manually wind it onto my bobbin. Still, I feel success!

A word of caution: bunnies love tearing up newspaper so keep your eyes peeled for rabbits lurking around corners ready to make shreds of your hard work.

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.