Socks

"A ball of yarn is the potential to make a dream you have come true"-Melanie Falk

 

Somehow I get curious about making socks. I don't know how make a sock, beyond making a tube and calling it a tube sock. I decide it give it a try.

The plan is to start from the very basics. 

I notice that I do not have a sheep. 

So I get a book about spinning wool, and a book about identifying different kinds of wool and which kinds are good for what. 

 

One thing I note is that some breeds of sheep, with names like "Polypay" are promoted for their good wool as extra side money benefits to the farmers who enslave the sheep primarily for the purpose of murdering them and eating them. This practice is ancient, but obsolete now because we don't need to eat meat to survive anymore. So I decide to avoid acquiring this kind of fleece. Instead I will look for breeds of connoisseur wool; ones good for spinning sock yarn, with the idea that no one would want to kill the provider of such great spinning wool.

 

I search the interwebs using words like organic and ethical. I study my fiber books. I visit my local sheep and fiber festival, looking at prize winning fleeces. I talk to neighbors with fiber animal pets.

 

After several months of research, I gaze upon an assortment of freshly shorn fleeces laid out all over the back deck. This sock adventure begins with dirty, greasy, raw fleeces. 

 

I trim the dirty ends off each lock, pick out the bits of field grass, and wash the locks in hot washing machine water (no agitation!) with liquid wool soap. 

 

These fleeces are just dripping with lanolin though. A second wash is needed. I wash the locks in smaller batches the second time with a little concentrated eco dish soap in a crock pot of nearly boiling water!

 

The summer wind and sun provide the drying, and soon I am spinning sample yarns. I pick a soft four ply Cormo/Merino yarn for the main body of the sock yarn, and a stronger four ply cable spun with a Romney/Corriedale fleece for the heel and toe. I spend days spinning very fine yarn. It takes five times longer to spin four ply as singles.

I dye the spun yarn with blue and green food coloring in the crock pot with some vinegar. By now my fine spun yarn looks pretty fat.

 I watch a utube on how to knit socks on your circle loom and follow along with it. I use a 31 peg loom, she uses a 24 peg, but it should not matter...

It does. I pull my creations off the loom with great anticipation and find socks big enough for a baby elephant! Soon I am un-knitting my precious yarn from the 95% finished socks!

The next day I start all over with recovered yarn balls and the 24 peg loom...

Finally...

Here is my very first pair of socks, made from scratch! Tah dah!

 

"I like making a piece of string into something I can wear"-unknown

I wonder how these socks will wear?

Juggling Games

“Start small.

Start now.

Start everything.

And don’t bother to finish any of it.” 

- Barbara Sher, Refuse to Choose!: Use All of Your Interests, Passions, and Hobbies to Create the Life and Career of Your Dreams

 

A year ago I wrote as I embarked upon a little juggling experiment: How many projects could I be working on concurrently before it began to be a problem? (Blog)

 

Now my little experiment is reporting some results. I have learned I can indeed start many projects. Sometimes I can look away from one and start another. I notice the one I look away from tugs on me a bit. This is an energetic minus, but the energetic plus is that while I'm gone from it, that tug actually is from me, working on it, in the back of my mind. I get new insights. The work deepens.

 

The buzz of excitement of starting a new project then, adds up to a positive on my energy ledger. So how long then, before I start so many projects that I simply spread it too thin? 

 

To find out, I put a loom project in every room, every corner, and carry a small one around with me too. 

 

The joy of creating is available everywhere. 

 

Having lots of balls in the air keeps any one of them from becoming too precious. This is good.  That overly precious attitude can suppress spontaneous urges to follow inspiration where it may lead. 

 

Preciousness can also cause me to hesitate to start.

  

Many projects tug at once, and still I start more! I fill the laundry room with dye projects. The cold water cotton dyes lead to being curious about heated wool dyes. This process leads me to dye roving and fleece, and to spinning the wool. Now I am making art yarn. Which leads to starting projects made out of art yarn....

 

  

 

And so on...

All these on top of the other things that need to be done such as daily chores, social and work obligations, that compete for time and energy, of course.

Eventually, I find a kind of saturation point. Not a point of not wanting to start even more new projects, oh no. I can always entertain a novel idea. But I am not the kind of person who is always starting but not finishing things.

 

I have two problems. First, I keep finishing things. I love the feeling of finishing things, so it is hard to not just stay right here with this one and just see what it will turn out like! 

 

The second problem is not finishing things! There will always be a point at which one simply makes no appreciable progress on anything because at this rate, working on each one a little at a time, this baby hat will be ready....about when the kid starts high school!

 

Feeding an active project is like taking care of a beloved kid or pet; you feed it with your attention. Except, unlike with living creatures, you can deprive it of attention for irregular periods of time, as long as you keep a thread going. 

 

Even so, like the dusty houseplant in the corner, if neglected too long, it may die. At least one of the projects I started may not ever find enough support from me to make it to completion. But maybe my diverse garden of projects is beneficial here too. The ones that don't make it get crowded out by the better ones, and I avoid wasting time on the duds.

 

I must admit that in the course of my experiment I don't do anything truly huge and awesome, just lots of little things, though some are still in progress. This could indicate being spread too thin. Perhaps I will now finish everything and see what happens. 

 

I wonder when (and if, you never know) I will start that 'tactile walkable plane of orbs' project I'm thinking of .....

..Oh! Just doing that now..

 

"One never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done." 

-Marie Curie

A year ago I wrote

New Pond Pearl

Chartreuse, chartreuse,

It's just no use,

You tire the eye

And hog the juice!

 
 

 

 

I finally cannot stand it any longer.

 

Not to be mean, Charlene, but I'm changing the scene. A new pond pearl now graces Fox Pond. 

This evolving kinetic art installation, Pond Pearls  changes today. We have had Charlene, the chartreuse pond pearl, for about a year now, plenty of time to contemplate the energy and effect of the color chartreuse. 

 

 Chartreuse is loud, soulless, attention grabbing, even rude. It's hardly a regular color at all! I often have to leave it out of my rainbows because it does not play well with the other colors, it is too domineering. Does this remind me of the outer world, which, at the moment seems to be coarsening somewhat?

 

I put up with it why?

Because it was there?

 

It is time for a new phase. 

Pearly. 

 

It is still early in the new pearly phase. So I don't know all that it will be about, for if I knew, there would be no point. There is always wonder.

 

But pearly is a color of undifferentiated swirling light in which all of the colors of the rainbow are hidden. A pearl stands for layers of protection. Layers, like clothing, social atmospheres, the meme-sphere, ozone layers, blankets of shared pollution, filters obscuring and bending penetrating light, insulation, shielding one another from harm, even the aura we create around ourselves with our power of attention.

 

Also, the pearly color carries the wisdom of longlasting, dark, irritation producing a beautiful thing that comes to light and is then treasured and valued. A pearl of wisdom, gained from hard experience, such as being incarnated on Earth right now.

 

"Sand irritates the oyster and the oyster responds with a beautiful pearl.

 Allow difficulties to serve your transformation in the blossoming consciousness that you are." -RB

 

Spring at the Pond and in the World

"If winter comes, can spring be far behind? - P. B. Shelley

Whenever it really comes down heavy, I get ready to head out for my walk, because the sun will soon be out. Big downpours clear the sky, I've noticed.

Change is slow, no matter which way you want it to go. But we can all agree that spring is beautiful. 

 

Will we wisen up fast enough for our ever growing technological power, I wonder.

I fret and worry that we cannot change as fast as we need to now, but a walk in the natural world in the spring harmonizes my soul. It brings up something like hope. Who cannot welcome rainbows and perfumed violets and sunshine after months of cold and gray?  

The fabulously glamorous and fancy Wood Duck pair pays a visit to the pond  Wood Ducks fly low through through the woods, visiting little ponds like this one.

 

The pond develops orange patches. On closer observation they are goldfish, perhaps fifty to seventy five of them, hovering in place together, like an orange tree, or a squadron of little florescent orange blimps in the pond sky. 

 

These are the cohort of last year's baby fish, about five inches long, that have survived the winter. This, despite me witnessing the great blue heron swooping in and gobbling several glittering bright fish only a couple of days ago. Makes me wonder why these fish are so very, very bright orange.

The orange blob of fish coheres. They seem to be into eating the newly grown green mossy plant things which drift in puffy clumps here and there, on the abundant swollen winter rain washed pond. 

I give Charlene, the Pond Pearl, a gentle kick, through the air and back over to the main pond from the seasonal side creek where the wind has blown it. As the ripple of disturbance that Charlene's arrival causes reaches the little school, the entire flotilla imperceptibly sinks in unison. Were they even really there at all? Oh yes, I took a picture of them.

 

The biophelia induced by this glorious spring day guides me to the realization of another glimpse of the vision of the flower child's garden planet for peace and love:

Don't lose heart. Even like the debut of spring, when the time is ripe for change it can be dramatically, efficiently, exuberantly fast. 

 

Only days ago, eight inches of snow was the view from my window. I could no longer even see color properly because the sunlight was so scarce. Dimness and dampness surrounded us as we huddled around the warmth of our personal devices.

  

Now it's only a couple of weeks later. The clouds part and it is as if the red curtains open, the lights go on, and spring roars onstage with dancers and flowers twirling in a sun sparking rainbow drenched kaleidoscope!

 

 

 This is like my vision for the future, the flower child's garden planet, and we can start now. Or more like, we can continue on, for it has been well underway for quite a while. 

 

In the beginning things are often bumpy and chaotic, like now. Like spring, especially before the colors come out. I write this in March, about which they say "in like a lion and out like a lamb".

 

But all of the gratuitous beauty, potential, and hope embodied in the moment of spring is also found in this moment in the world. We are not doomed to blow the whole thing up, even though we stand on many dangerous precipices. 

We have incredible natural resources in the form of our shared knowledge due to the information revolution, which has itself come of age in the  internet. Any given minute, the whole world is full of individuals who are waking up, smartening up, wising up. 

I do not care what your economic philosophy is, if it does not take into account the tremendous riches of knowledge we all suddenly now share, you have missed the bus. This is a quantum leap from arithmetic to multiplicative. 

 

Today the world is full of answers, solutions, and caring people-who can find each other. We are quite simply all wealthier when we share. We are riding a great wave of wealth composed and generated by sharing. (For example: check it out, Kindspring)

 

We are greater than the sum of our parts. But this dimension of our newly acquired abundance may not be obvious from every standpoint. People see things when they are relaxed enough to ask. 

 

It is no mean feat to relax at a time like this. But please be patient, as each individual root gathers pure snowmelt water, and abides. Your own little flower, curled up tightly in your hope of spring, is your own soul garden. Open your own petals in your own hearts' way, as you wish, and rejoice with everyone in the beauty of our shared meadow of awakening love. 

 

Alternately, this momentous time is but a flashing shaft of light as the clouds of bedazzled ignorance and manipulated fear close in around us once again for another dark and repressive age. Of course it is impossible to predict since everyone has choices. 

 

I wonder what we will choose.

“You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep Spring from coming.” 

- Pablo Neruda