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.

Charles Van Grooten

Charles Van Grooten is a House Rabbit Society foster bunny who came into my life after I lost a dear Californian rabbit to a heart attack during surgery. I was smitten by the sweet nature of big white bunnies with their contemplative faces and beautiful red eyes. After over a year of Chuck living with us he developed a bump on his side. The bump was an abscess that apparently developed from a BB that was lodged in his side from being shot before I knew him. Poor Chuck! The BB and abscess removal went well but he came out of the surgery with head tilt. He’s recovered remarkably well but he does lose his balance once in a while and if his 4 feet on not on the floor he’s not sure which way is up.

One of Chuck’s activities before head tilt was skyping with my daughter’s friends on her computer. She took an awesome picture of him staring into the computer screen. I couldn’t help but transform it into a fiber art piece. After needle felting a wool layer down with the color scheme I decided to use a mohair blend of yarn for finishing. There is some metallic yarn and flax as well. I still have to work the border but I couldn’t wait to get it on my blog for everyone to see. As me and my daughter would say, ahh, Chuck.

Fair Trade

These days when I hear “Fair Trade” I usually think of coffee.  Fair trade, which is intended to support decent wages and higher social standards, includes many other goods including handcrafts, cocoa, chocolate, tea and other items. 

When I was young a fair trade meant that my brother gave me what I considered to be the right amount of marbles for a handful of Jujubes.  With that definition in mind, this is my fair trade.  Every week a friend drives to my workplace, drops off the Sunday paper and picks up the coupon packets from my paper.  She is heavily into couponing and needs 4 sets of coupons for the best discounts.  I’m thrilled because I don’t have to concern myself with running out of newspaper for my bunnies’ litter boxes.  I ran out once and had to use wood shavings – it was awful.  As a bonus, the newspaper comes in plastic that’s used to protect it in the rain, which these days seems to be every day.  Sometimes the plastic from Sunday's paper is printed with advertisements and I’ve been waiting to have enough to spin some into yarn.  Here’s a pic of the yarn that I spun from the printed plastic.  What I learned while spinning was to avoid doing it on a hot, muggy day.  I had a dickens of a time getting the plastic to feed through the spinning wheel’s orifice and most of the time had to wind it on the bobbin manually.

 To see more of my plastic yarn and some of the items I made from it, here's a link to the yarn section of my Etsy shop: http://www.etsy.com/shop/Kruser?section_id=5414269