Today I spent two hours carding lavender Gotland-Merino fleece with black alpaca, blue-gray angora bunny, colorful mohair locks, silk sari threads, and angelina, and then about an hour and a half spinning and plying a yarn that I was at several times convinced I would have to abandon as a complete waste of time. I was attempting an improvised plying technique involving the building of beads, pods, beehives, and sometimes more involved architectural structures, wrapped in black ramie thread to secure them, but the black thread was not behaving itself properly, resulting in a few “thread hammocks” following my structures, and in the yarn unspinning itself to a dangerous extent in the course of my plying shenanigans. I was having fun experimenting, but I was pretty sure the resulting yarn would either be worthless or fit only for yet more experimentation.
Well after a good long soak in warm water and Eucalan wool wash, the Merino-blend wool plumped up, the “thread hammocks” as a result mostly disappeared, the unspun areas tightened, and here’s what I’ve got drying on my shower rack:
The moral of the story? As Gaiman pointed out during his keynote address, don’t be afraid to make spectacular mistakes; they often lead to spectacular successes. (Or something along those lines.) Also? As Jolene keeps saying whenever I start bitching about my just-completed yarn, “I’m not even listening to you until after you’ve soaked it and dried it.”
