Friday, August 26, 2011

It's All in the Presentation, Honey

So last week I decided that I needed some all out decadent, hedonistic joy in my life. Unfortunately, I had just weighed in with my son's Wii Fit, and had it chastise me for letting days pass without regaling it with my shoddy Wii Fit hula hooping skills, so heading to the store for more chocolate didn't seem like the right way to go.

So instead, I pulled out my last fiber purchase from the Shepherds' Market in Rush, NY. Yes, it was there that I got a bug up my butt and insisted on buying all the marine blue dehaired cashgora that Black North Fiber had to sell. Sorry, when I indulge, I do not do it in snippets. Nosiree, I suffer from a completion obsession, so I cannot leave anything behind. People who buy an ounce of fiber and then make a sweater or a trenchcoat out of it are to be admired, but they are not me. I never know what will be made of my spun creations, and I hate to think that I might go back to the vendor and discover that someone else has bought the last bit of something for which I need more, more, more. So I ended up with a collection of this lovely soft fiber. And so I began to spin.

And spin.

And spin some more.


Up close and personal with the cashgora. How's that for a color?

Now, my normal procedure is to complete spinning one project before starting the next. But life took a turn for the worse, and I found I needed to raise the bar on my decadent, hedonistic joy in life. So I went upstairs and pulled out the bunny.

Oh, yes, the bunny.

But, it was kind of dark upstairs when I had this epiphany, so I stuck my hand in a bin, felt up the contents until I hit the land of angora, and dragged down the bag and started spinning. Straight from the bag. No extra prep.

I'm a WILD WOMAN.

The spinning went pretty well. Normally, I blend the bunny in with other fibers, but my friend Denise had advised me of the virtues of spinning "straight bunny", so that's what I did.

In the morning, in the true light of day, I discovered that my bag o' bunny didn't look all that good. In fact, I worried that I was creating ugly bunny, a diservice to the angoras of the world.



So I stopped and switched back to the soft cashgora and discovered a terrible terrible thing.

Once you spin bunny, you never want to go back.

Yes, it's true. That wonderful cashgora felt like I was spinning macrame twine. So I switched back to the ugly bunny. Then back to the macrame twine.



Please note, you should not conclude from this that cashgora isn't a lovely soft fiber. It is merely that the bunny is so overwhelmingly softer than just about anything else that the cashgora temporarily lost its luster for me.

Then back to the bunny. More ugly bunny. And then, suddenly, in the light of day, I noticed that the ugly bunny was spinning up LOVELY. Yessir. You might want to fight your way into my house and wrest the spun bunny away from me. It is that nice.

Somehow, the ugly bunny, which was festering in a Glad Bag looking all muddled, with a piece of masking tape stuck to the bag that just said "Bunny", has turned into a delightful meld of grey (I overdyed some grey in there, apparently) and all the luscious colors of the ocean. Stand back. I am now feeling so utterly complacent in my satisfying decadence that I am actually thinking of KNITTING THE FORMERLY UGLY BUNNY.


1 comment:

  1. Have you ever thought about plying that bunny with alpaca? Just a thought on yumminess.

    I can totally concur with the obsession of more. But I also have a textile background and my husband is insisting that too much fabric is too much. My take on it is someday all the workers are going to give up their terribly paying jobs and give the middle to places that provide the world with clothing. I'll be sitting on a goldmine.
    Tee hee. And the world thinks I'm a little off, because that could NEVER happen. Ha. Waiting for the day.
    Beautiful work by the way.
    Karen Cross, Seattle
    crosshaven1@hotmail.com

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