fibergarden

Ok, so I’ve spent the better part of the day spinning a corespun yarn of mohair locks. The yarn is spun in ‘mohairy’ style, wrapped loosely around a core of vintage lambswool 2 ply yarn I picked up at a tag sale. Honestly, the finished product is really gorgeous, though I’ll never recoup the time spent making it by selling it–I’ve already named it “Labor Of Love” yarn due to the hours spent on it. For now, I’m considering crocheting it into a boa, maybe. Maybe not.

The fiber is from lovely, unprocessed angora goat locks (aka mohair), washed and dyed in shades of greens and pinks and browns. It arrived in yet another great big box of fiber. It looks gorgeous in the bag–like a bag of luxury. That is, until you start fiddling with it and realize just how much dirt is stuck in the locks. Now I realize that this is just the nature of the beast (literally), and I have no wish to insult the goat grower/owner/fiber dyer in question. I’ve already done that, unwittingly, once before, to an animal owner, and I promise not to do it again! That insult was due to my own stupidity of just not understanding how much dirt to expect in locks. That was as a novice spinner who has only bought piles of commercially processed rovings in their stark, straight rows, ready to spin without regard to the amount of feed and work and grease and hay and bugs and dye that’s been added, removed and tended prior to their arrival in a neat little box from the USPS. Though I still have volumes to learn about spinning, I realize how stupid I was then. I know better, NOW.

However, despite my growing knowledge as I spin daily, I still have issues with mohair locks. My lingering and painful question about locks is how the HECK do you get all of the dirt out of them? I teased these open prior to carding, carded them on my brand new Strauch Finest 405 Drum Carder, hand picked them down to the tweezer level, and still there are chunks of vm (vegetable matter) in the form of hay and straw and thistles and a few bugs and who-knows-what else in there. And I know that when I wash this yarn to set the twist, I’ll get to witness yet more dirt as the water will be gross for several changes until I get it to wash clean. The finished product will be great, but whether I’ll ever finish this remains to be seen. Blech.

What’s a girl to do?

In the midst of the holiday craze, rushing to get houses cleaned, extra food prepared and frozen for company, christmas shopping, and creating scarves and yarns and other stuff for holiday gift giving and (of course) sale over at my web site, Handmade, a really bright spot in my not-so-great-craft-fair weekend: Somebody bought my yarn purely to look at! This, I think is the ultimate compliment to an artist. Now I feel that the journey to transform my caterpillar-crafty self to a butterfly-artist is really beginning to move along.

Up until now, I really thought of myself as a craftswoman…but the artist in me is trying to emerge from my crafty exterior while I surround myself with fiber. As a medium, it is fast enough for my attention-deficit-crafting-disorder; in other words, I can make something from start to finish in a few hours so there’s no guilt about UFO’s (unfinished objects, for the uninitated craftaholics out there) cluttering up the house. But it’s more about this imperceptible quality to fiber. There are so many things that raw fiber can become, and we just have to wait for the muse to draw it out of us, and then we’ll decide what each fleece/dyepot/batt/roving/yarn is yearning to be.

Anyhow…all that aside as a much larger discussion for another day–this weekend, on Sunday at a craft fair, a woman bought my yarn purely to look at. She was allergic to lanolin/wool and told me so as she admired Jen and my scarves and creations. Then she came back and bought Feltalicious:

When I asked her what she wanted with yarn since she couldn’t touch it, she told me she had a place to put it just for decorating. She thought it was beautiful and just wanted to look at it….my yarn….wow. There is no greater compliment. Hence my transofmation from caterpillar to butterfly is in motion. I’m in my coccoon and spinning away, trying to transform from hobbiest/craftswoman to artist. It’s harder than it sounds, but I think I will get there, if I live long enough.

At camp pluckyfluff east, one of the questions Mike (our documentarian–is that a word?) asked: “Is your yarn a finished object?” And in my non-so-clear way, I tried to explain that I thought yarn is art. It is finished whan I decide it’s finished. It doesn’t need to be anything else, ever. It is just as useful as an object of art as it is when another artist transforms it into a hat or scarf or sweater. Honestly, yarn is the ultimate art, as it’s both beautiful and functional. As a gardener, that’s my focus. As someone who admires well made homes, and textiles, and furniture, that’s my focus. As someone who drools over beautiful and tasty food and kitchen tools and pots and pans, that’s my focus.

Form plus function. Indeed…