What Got Made

The silks arrived and then my Dad died. Inbetween slogging away at funeral preparations and eulogy writing, I set up an 8 foot table in the basement and started churning out silk scarves. I know my Dad would totally understand; when he felt under pressure, he always fell back to routines himself. Mom said that every time she went into the hospital, she'd come home and find another new tv set up in another part of the house, complete with a vcr. Dad would explain that he thought a tv would improve her lot in life. In the meantime, he'd be adjusting his schedule of how many movie channels he could videotape movies from, and then cuss away while he got it working. You can't imagine how complicated it must have been to have three televisions with three vcrs taping every movie Dad could possibly consider interesting. I can imagine, because I now have to figure out what to do with all those hundreds of videos. Don't even get me started on the DVDs.

Anyway, I made three scarves, one for my sister-in-law Pat, who is going on a trip and needed hers in time for the trip, one for my best friend Julie from grammar school, who was having a bridal shower, and one for the funeral. OK, I made a fourth one, but it didn't come out quite right, so now it's got a spot on top of the entertainment unit, underneath the Lego models. oh, yes, some day I'll have to tell you about the Legos.

This is the first one I made, for my sister-in-law Pat. Do you see the gold? That's gold tussah silk, and I love how that turned out. Because my sister-in-law lives in Texas, a freakishly over-heated sweltering part of the country if ever there was one, I made this one as light-weight as possible.

I made this one for my friend Julie. Those dashes of magenta are from pieces of my original butterfly cloak's silk. And the black is the edging of the underlying black silk. I don't waste anything. Oh, and for this one, I remembered to use silk hankies. The pink you see is from the edges of silk hankies. I love all the green silk that I put in. Totally cool.

And this is the last scarf, my funeral scarf. The nice thing about nuno felting is that you can do something interesting on one side, and then do something different on the other side, to create two complementing looks.

Oops, in this picture, the dog looks better than the scarf. What can I say? The dogs really like my projects. But here are two more pictures, hopefully showing what I was getting at about the two-sided opportunities with nuno felted scarves. I don't know if you can tell, but in the first picture, I learned a little lesson from my friend Denise, and used gold firestar. I tried firestar (which is colored tinsel) when I first started nuno felting, but I was too heavy handed so it looked like chunked up tinsel. But Denise did a scarf where she laid out the firestar in wispy threads, and that turned out A-MAZING. Anyway, this side of the scarf also has lots of purple angora (I do so love bunny!) and green silk that I dyed myself.

You might conclude I was aiming a little gloomier on the flipside, with the black mohair. Can you see the clomps of grey? I cut up a lovely grey silk scarf that had flowers on it. I really like the way the silk is embraced by the wool so that it scrunches up.

This is a closeup showing the black and grey silk scarf infusion.

For what it's worth, it's pretty hard to take pictures that do justice to this art form, but I've given it my best shot.

By the way, if you'd like to contribute to the arts, dig through your closet and look for super-thin silk - silk scarves are particularly handy. I pick them up at garage sales, thrift shops and church sales, but the garage sale season has come to an end up here in the northern tundra, so my supply isn't keeping up with my demand.