Anyway, this is what I'm spinning to make those gloves. I can't wait. I hope I get the weight of the yarn right. If not, I might have to go BUY some yarn to make the gloves. They seem too sexy for normal yarn, though.
Now, back to our regular programming... Distractions. Yes, distractions, my precious. I am making this sign for Tempe Yarn and Fiber:
It's double sided. I cut those letters on my Cricut after fitting them perfectly into the width they needed to be. I cut four of each letter and glued them in a stack so that they would be more like chip board. I love how people think a Cricut makes everything super fast and easy. I mean, comparatively speaking, I suppose it does. But because it cuts everything faster than you can do with scissors, you find yourself cutting far more than you'd ever cut yourself and giving yourself hours of work even though you have a Cricut. At least this is my experience with the thing. I love it to distraction. But, yeah. I feel a little righteous indignation stirring in me every time I show a project I made with my Cricut and people think it's so quick and easy. And I'm thinking, "No. It's quicker than it would have been, but it still took about thirty seconds less than forever." Like, the Cricut just makes it POSSIBLE for you to put your inner vision into production. It's a tool. It's certainly not magical.
Anyway, the stupid curls on the wire took forever, too. (I'm in a bit of a crabby mood today. I watched Eat, Pray, Love yesterday and I pretty much hated every second of it. I thought it was so dumb. But I won't get into that right now.) I learned from my Silver Threads book that to make truly lovely curls in wire, you need to make them look more like the curl in a snail's shell, rather than just a straight spiral. And that's actually pretty easy if you're working with wire that has any kind of spring. Aluminum just doesn't. I had to physically curl every millimeter of that wire to make it look like that, and then I hammered and connected and blah, blah, blah... that was a process, too.
And I'm saying all of this because the sign looks so simple. Doesn't it? Doesn't it look like virtually no work went into it whatsoever? But here I am with hours and hours of my life into the thing and I don't know what to do. I don't know if this is acceptable. I had wrapped tons of beads around the wire, too. But when I went to hang the thing up, the top wire started bending too much from the weight of the beads, so I had to take the beads off. I'm wondering at this point if I need to take the whole thing apart and rethink it all, or just take it in. Adam says I'm over thinking it. No. Remember? Extremely focused. I don't think I can obsess too much about this thing which isn't just supposed to be a lovely pointer to their machine washable yarn section, but also is supposed to be a huge advertisement for the work that I sell in the shop. I was in last time and Aaron asked me about the sign. This is the nice way of saying, "Can you please finish it up already?" And I don't know what to do!
Well, Elliott saw me taking pics of the sign and insisted that I take a picture of him. So here he is. Man, I love him. He's too cute. And he's pretty much the main reason that the sign isn't finished yet. This is my excuse right here.
Maybe this, too.... I have two skeins of this lovely yarn made now. I love it. Everyone loves it. They say it's soft and can't believe it was spun with just plain Merino. I feel like finishing up twenty skeins of it and mailing it all off to Stephanie Pearl-McPhee because it was reading her archives and learning about long draw that is making all of this spinning possible. I love her. I love how she shares everything she knows so freely. And I love all of her "useless" books about knitting. (Although Knitting Rules wasn't useless. It was so funny and so useful.) And, just so you know, I'm not being mean. She jokes about writing "knitting humor". And how she has to clarify when people try to clarify that she must write patterns, that she doesn't write patterns, she isn't a designer, and she writes "useless books about knitting". I love it.
Here are the tags I made and attached to my yarns. I can post a tutorial about these later. I couldn't believe how many people have commented on the tags. I did it, not because I'm some super amazing and extremely focused person, but because I can't stand to put some plain thing labeling yardage and whatnot on my HANDSPUN yarn. And the only reason I've labeled these is because they have a very specific and different stripe sequence. There are two sets of a five color stripe sequence in these. I did this to try and prevent pooling and whatnot in my knitted object. Stripe sequences A and B, if you like... and the first skein is A, B, A. The second skein is B, A, B. The third will be A, B, A... Yeah. Don't look at me like that. Extremely focused.
Here are pretty pens I made yesterday while I was avoiding the sign staring at me from my wall. I love the skinner blend. I will sand and buff them today as I bake the dice I made for a new Farkle set for my purse. Yes. I'm doing polymer clay to avoid the sign. This is all turning rather ugly.
I can't believe how excited I was at first when they asked me to make the sign. I'm still excited, actually. I've never been "commissioned" for something like this before, even though I know it's not really that big of a deal. The potential of it all drives me crazy. It's so public. For forever now, all of my friends in TYF will see this sign and know that I made it and if it sucks, it will be forever that people will look up and think, "Ugh... I'm skipping Kathy's display because clearly she has no discernible talent." And the discomfort of never buying my stuff again will seep into our relationships until eventually I sit at the table and people barely say hi to me and I disappear into a corner and then Terry and Fred ask me to get my worthless junk out of their shop and my sign gets accidentally run over by a car and they bring in someone better who will dazzle and wow everyone and they will forget that I exist.
And then I'd be forced to shop for my fiber stuff at the local-shop-which-shall-not-be-named. A fate worse than death. I can't do it. I couldn't do it. The sign has to be perfect.
But I have to make more dice first. Maybe spin... and dream of sexy gloves. You know. To take the edge off.
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