It's been raining enough here that the ground is super saturated. As we were outside briefly at the local high school tonight, the planted grass between the main building and the theater building was drowning in puddles -- nowhere for the water to escape to, and the ground beneath it had absorbed all that it could.
“Dare to love yourself
as if you were a rainbow
with gold at both ends.”
― Aberjhani, Journey through the Power of the Rainbow: Quotations from a Life Made Out of Poetry
Some days are just like that, you know?
And on days like this, sometimes you learn that the Greeks had a goddess of rainbows - Iris. She was Hera's messenger, like Zeus had Hermes. And sometimes you learn that Iris has a fraternal twin sister, Arke, who is the messenger for the Titans, like Hermes and Iris are for the Olympians. Arke is also said to represent the fainter second rainbow that you sometimes see when the light is just right. It's always nice to learn something new in a day!
After a meeting in the morning, I decided that today was the day I was going to get the warp I set up last week on to the loom. It's going to be sort of an experiment. I was quite happy with the scarf I wove a few months ago, so I'm trying something closer to shawl/wrap size. And plaid. Because apparently that's a thing that needs to happen. After a little bit of figuring out how to discreetly start/end the weft as the colors shift, I discovered something quite clever that I think will look decent. It's a loose weave, so I can't just double an end in without it being kind of apparent, but if I take a crochet hook and wrap it back around itself and then through the middle of the strand, it blends right in quite nicely. We'll see how it looks when I'm done. Here's what it looks like so far...
Once it comes off the loom, it will not have so many spaces. It's always vaguely alarming looking on the loom when I'm doing something like this, and then once the tension is off, the yarn relaxes and floofs out and fills in some of the spaces. Yes. I am virtually positive that surely 'floof' is a highly technical fiber-working term!
One of the advantages about approaching fiber-work as an experiment is that it's just an experiment and I can kind of fiddle until I'm happy with it.
It's a lesson I try to take with me into other things. Sometimes I'm more successful than other times with that line of thought. I've never been much good at following recipes or patterns. I'm in the middle of knitting a hat, it's black angora and very shiny and it does not photograph well at all... Anyway, I was knitting along and I decided that instead of repeating a pattern three times that I was only going to do the middle pattern part because black and very shiny doesn't show the pattern strongly unless there's something to differentiate it from. As I was talking myself through how this was all going to flow, M1 says to me, "MOM. Mom. You're doing it again. You really can't just follow the instructions ever, can you!? You do the same thing when you're cooking too!" Which. Ahhh. Yes. About that. No. Sort of. I mean, if the instructions serve my purpose, I can follow them very well, but sometimes (and let's be honest here, a LOT of the time) the instructions aren't actually what I think needs to happen and then I do have a tendency to take a certain... creative license... with things.
So, with all that said -- look for the rainbows, and the double rainbows, and, if I may quote Jack Sparrow, "The code is more like... guidelines... than rules..." Substitute recipe or pattern, or instructions, etc for "code" as you desire.
With love and curiosity,
--Susan