My Dream Job

The perfect job is out there for everyone, if only they can find it.  The one born without a sense of smell becomes a skunk researcher, Type A personalities find high-powered jobs with underlings they can persecute, women with a great need to nurture have eighteen children . . .


If I could have found my perfect dream job in this world, I would have responded to an advertisement for an embroiderer who wished to make samplers.  Only samplers.  At the interview, I would have walked up the steps of a rather formal-looking Regency home to find a buzzing foundation at work behind the panelled doors.  The foundation supported and promoted a love for stitched samplers (stay with me).  I would produce my portfolio of cloths for inspection by a middle-aged woman dressed in a navy suit and wearing glasses with the never-lose-me chain around her neck.  She would ask me several questions about the stitches I used, the thread, then stare gravely across at me and say, “This position requires some looseness of stitching, someone who does not have a desire to create perfect stitches in perfect rows.  The stitcher must be willing to try any manner of thread or yarn or synthetic substitute and stitch joyously across the linen.  Color and texture are a major concern.  The successful applicant must be willing to spend years exploring the art of the stitch, but must not create organized samplers with mind-numbing rows of perfectly aligned clones.”

It is at this point in the interview that my fingers begin to twitch, and I am frankly salivating and this somber woman concludes:  ”We have had many applicants for this job, but I believe you have the loose quality we are looking for.”  I take delight in this dubious compliment as the woman removes her glasses, lets them ride on her bosom, rises from her chair and reaches across her desk to shake my hand.

“Now,” she says, “Go forth and explore the world of stitchery.”

Ah, yes!  As I am babbling something about being so happy to be a part of this project, the woman guides me to a door.

“Welcome aboard,” she smiles, pushing the door wide.  Inside is a rainbow that stretches around the walls of a large room, and the rainbow is thread— flosses, woolens, silks, linens, rayons, hemp, even the glitzy metallics and flashy polyesters!  Soft perles, hard-twist rayons, linens plied into every size imaginable—it is enough to make the heart stutter.

I never found that advertisement.  I wonder if that makes me an unfulfilled ex-member of the workforce?

Saga of the Dressed-Up Wool

I never know whether I should thank my father for the obsessive-compulsive gene he passed on to me, or if I should volunteer for gene replacement study, but sometimes obsessive determination is a wonderful characteristic to have.

I have been crocheting a lot lately (all right, compulsively).  The problem I have is I want to use beautiful yarn that is not hair-pullingly difficult to work with.  A little lumpy, but not horribly so.  Beads would be nice.  Add to that list of requirements that I should not have allergic reactions to the content.  Here, I am afraid that wool drops off the radar. But wool is so forgiving, so embracing!

*Sigh*  The truth is this:  I am in the process of crocheting the wool out of the studio.  It has to go.  But I would like to give it a nice send-off.  This is how the Saga Of The Dressed-Up Wool began. . .

On a trip to Asheville several weeks ago, I found a skein of yarn that was made of lengths (18 inches) of rather commonplace yarns knotted together.  Unlike some others of this cobbled-together yarn I have seen that was put together with outrageous fibers of multiple (and very incompatible) weights, these commonplace lengths looked as if they could be crocheted easily.  The knots would be decorative.  The weight of the yarn was a worsted one, so there was the consistency I always look for.  I also discovered that the yarn was made by a Mom and her two children, so I plunked over the $25.00 for the skein immediately (cottage industries need to be nurtured).

The skein stayed in my mind as we went on to other things in Asheville, and after a while I realized I was actively working on improving the yarn with all these mental gymnastics!  At Purl's, on Wall Street, Elizabeth so kindly gave me all the "trimmings" from the store's ball-winding station.  They are always so interesting, and there are lengths that can be used for embroidery or felting or . . . As we approached our car, it suddenly hit me that the yarn I wanted could be made by hand but it would not have to be spun, as I have no aspirations to be a spinner at this late stage of my life.  The half-bag of trimmings, some beads--- I suddenly had latched onto a way to create an interesting yarn!

Between Saturday and Sunday, I worked for about twelve hours on this project.  To describe the process, you must grant me a certain willing suspension of disbelief (Coleridge, I think).  After knotting some of the interesting yarns from the bag of trimmings from Purl's onto some hand-spun yarn, I hand-sewed seed beads, buttons, small chips of stone and quartz, other beads and trims, to a staggering 15 yards of wool yarn.  Wool?  you are asking with a puzzled look.  Yes, wool.  Wool because it does have that "forgiving" quality I mentioned, and because it can hide the carrier thread for all these gizmos I was hanging onto the yarn.  I was careful not to flap the yarn around and send up sprays of wool particles to sent my allergies on the alert again, but I did take Monday completely off to let things settle a bit both in the studio and in my imagination.

The result of this slave-labor effort is an absolutely drop-dead gorgeous yarn.  Well, to me it is a drop-dead gorgeous yarn.  It began as the yarn in the first photo up top.  These are some of the results:

If this does not make your mouth water, maybe you are reading the wrong blog.  I digress.  Forgive me.

On Monday, while I was recuperating from the yarn decorating frenzy, I did some serious thinking about what I'd done in the studio over the weekend.  This same technique would work well with the wool cord I'd made earlier, wouldn't it?  And think of the objects I could add to the list for embellishment:

• sweater-wool felted shapes
• leather shapes
• embroidered shapes
• crocheted (with small, tight yarn) shapes
• vintage trims and lace snippets
• old game pieces
• sequins
• bracelet charms
• alphabet beads
• vintage jewelry pieces

I could make that felted cord meant originally for a simple neckpiece into a marvel of ostentation . . . Yes, another project, which will also be totally unexplainable to my friends, but immensely interesting to me.  So, thank you, Daddy, for the obsessive-compulsive gene.  I would be in the throes of a really dull retirement without it.

Allergies on the Rise

9:00 a.m.:There has been too much crocheting going on in the studio (and the sunroom, where the sofa is so comfy).  From my (silly) decision to crochet all of the wool out of the studio, there are two bags of finished work waiting to be wrapped for gift-giving during The Holidays.  My body, however, systematically resists an over-dose of wool, and is now in full armor.

My first reaction was to wait until the weather changes and the autumn finally comes (which may not be until early December, at the rate of the temperatures here in the Atlanta area), but that could be a long, long time in coming.  What to do with my hands, how to stay sane until then?

I was really feeling sorry for myself this morning when I read Diana Trout's blog, here, and suddenly realized she offered a solution to the wool /idle hands crisis:  WATERCOLORS!  I put them away two months ago when I embarked on the crocheting safari, but today is to be one of perestroika!  The blue box of paints and clutch of brushes will make there appearance on the drafting table.

She has a lovely plastic pallet for mixing and storing, which is more organized than my usual habit of using a ceramic plate.  Hmmm . . . .  I wonder if watercolors will work on fabric that has been soaked in bubble jet solution?

Time to move out to the laboratory.

More to come!

Note:  6:50 p.m.:  All the while I was painting, mixing blues that drew me into the most enchanting oceans, or greens from grass too lush to dream of cutting— well, all that time, I was thinking about fabric for quilting.  Maybe the watercolors were the path to something else?

Thank you, Diana.  I have several pages of background for my sketchbook, and a postcard with a purple sun and yellow sky.  Not a bad day!

Oh, and my sinuses are improved.

Playing With Wool

Once upon a time I made a felted cord (the musician in me resists typing "chord") and embroidered it, then made two felted and embroidered endings for it, adding some loopy knitting tapes to cap things off:

This cord was felted with roving, and a long piece of crewel wool was the center of it-- just in case the cord wanted to thin out and become many pieces.  I love the result, and combine it with a scarf and another felted neckpiece I found in Asheville (center of All Things Civilized) to wear with a blue wool jacket from Fall thru early spring.

Since that time, I have often thought about the process and how to vary it, how I might create another neckpiece that would be more interesting without slipping over the line into gaudiness, and this past week I began to work in earnest on the project.

First, I crocheted a cord of a lovely pale green and lavender heather wool, but ran out of the 3-ply yarn and found nothing with which to continue it, so at 30 inches, I set it aside and rumaged through the yarn to find a continuation.  No such luck.  Anything else I could find was not the right size, and was certainly much too soft.

Then I remembered a cone of ink bottle green Harrisville wool yarn meant for weaving.  Knitting and crochet threads have been fluffed and fulled after spinning, which is what makes them so appealing in a yarn store.  Yarns spun for weaving are left tight and unwashed so they are used first to weave piece then to full (wash or wet and agitate the yarn) the woven piece.  The fulling process is like a mini felting process, and it closes up the small spaces between the yarn in the cloth.

I started a second cord with the weaving yarn.  This Harrisville wool was a two ply, thin yarn, somewhere between a size 5 and 8 perle cotton, so the crochet was fraught with moments of searching for the correct swear word to express that particular situation.  After about ten or twelve inches, I realized that I could use that irregularity to my advantage, and I began to deliberately vary the thickness of the cord.  81 inches later, I was satisfied that I had enough cord to work with.

In this picture you see the cord and some of the irregularities I mentioned.

I decided to see what would happen if I began adding wool roving and wool stitching to the cord before it was felted.  Wow!!!  This was almost sinfully delightful, stuffing parts of the cord, wrapping other sections, needle felting the roving into the crocheted body, threading an especially large tapestry needle and stitching odd, random threads over the roving and around the crochet . . .  I should make dozens of these cords for my mental health!!!  Any frustrations I may have felt over the real or imaginary conflicts in my life were resolved with the work on the cord:

Gaudy?  I couldn't have cared if this cord ended up as a drapery tie-back in a bordello,  and I could have gone on for weeks this way except for the realization that as much fun as this was, the real fun would begin after the cord was felted and ready for embellishment.  I put the two pieces of cord in a mixing bowl and poured boiling water over them and stirred for a few moments.  The smell of wet animals filled the kitchen . . .  I wrinkled my nose and stirred some more.  Some of the blue dye released (probably from the roving), but when I drained the hot water off and changed to ice water, the color set.  A second bath of boiling water was clear, and after some more stirring the wool was ready for the washing machine.

Here I should explain that I cannot felt wool by hand any more because my palms are no longer flat, thank you Mr. Arthritis.  These days, I depend upon the washer for any felting that may happen around here.

Charles was glad to donate his yard-work clothes to the cause— denim is the best thing I have found to use with wool in the washer.  Denim is high-density, tightly-woven, and unless you are dealing with designer jeans, they have a pretty hard surface.  This is the perfect substitute for hands in agitating wool.

Into the wash.  I checked once to make sure things were not tangled, and the cord was shrinking nicely.  Maybe too nicely.

Out of the washing machine, the 81" cord now measured 76 inches!  And the pitiful pale green 30" cord came in at a whopping 32 inches!  The only explanation I could think of was that the pale greencord was beautifully uniform, but almost twice as fat as the second, longer cord.  In the shrinking process, the cord became thinner, but grew two inches longer, the way children enter puberty as chubby little buttons and come out tall and willowy . . . ???

Into the dryer.  Listening to the drum bang the clothes around, I wondered if the original 81inches of crocheted cord was going to be long enough to work with after all this processing!

The final measurements:  the 81" cord that shrank to 76"  now measures 68" long.  And little shrimp cord of 30" that grew to 32" is now 31" short.  I will set little shrimp aside and think of something for it to become, but not now.  The stitching and embellishing of the long cord begins this afternoon!