A Need of Thneeds

"Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, Nothing is going to get better. It's not."

- Dr. Seuss, The Lorax

In the story by Dr Seuss, the Once-ler cuts down the forest of Truffula trees to make these knitted things that are called Thneeds. The Once-ler can cut down the virgin forest but one time, so it is used but once. And we consumers think we need these products because they are advertised aggressively, so they are called Thneeds. What we *think* we *need*. This is the story I have in mind with my latest art project.

Having lost my art studio for the moment so Granny could move in with us, I now see my much neglected yarn collection in the living room every day, heaped in baskets, brimming with colors. They call to me, like they did not when tucked away in the shelves of my remote studio. Sometimes I feel a bit guilty for just having all this yarn without using it.

As a master rainbow weaver I amassed this fabulous color collection so as to have all the colors in my artist's palette. At the peak of my pure rainbow weaving studies, in which I wove only anatomically correct spectral sequences, I created rainbows that pushed right up to the very limits of human color perception. In this series, each rainbow I construct is a gradual transition from one pure, fully saturated color to the next, comprising around seventy five steps. This is about as many pure gradations you can perceive as distinct.

 

There they are now, the flaming baskets of colors, calling out to me, nudging, gently inviting, sometimes ruefully accusing. I respond! Right now I have no less than four different fiber projects going on. The Thneed Project is a series.

I'm on number six (above) right now... In part, it is indeed inspired by the impulse to just use up all the yarn, dammit!

 

So this is how I come to make absurdities. The Thneeds. I knit these little darlings on the round knitting looms with pegs. I still can't figure out knitting, but these looms are just my speed. They keep count of the stitches and everything is simple and obvious. I google around on using multiple looms on one piece, but find nothing.

 

So, does this stop me? Of course not. After several tries I discover that I can plop a round loom down on any knitted area, pull a circle of threads up into the inside of the loom, and start an appendage growing out of it! What fun! The Thneeds begin to ooze out of the little looms like crazy toothpaste.

 

Do you need a thneed? They are wonderful and awful and crazy and beautiful and I love them!

The Thneeds remind me very much of the Dr Seuss style, leggy and colorfully absurd. And totally useless! Like art. (Kidding.) Like so many of the extrusions of this consumer thing-obsessed society. More on knitting "Thneeds"

Along other lines of inspiration, the construction process shows the string, tube, and spherical nature of objects in the world, even in the forming of all things physical in the universe. String theory! The art and math of creation! It is as if I have cracked the divine code and now I can knit anything! I wonder what the next Thneed will look like....