A yarn can be something that you knit or weave or even stitch with, or it can be a tangled tale with twists and turns and little diversions along the way.
The first meaning is obviously what the image below is all about. Yes, a little while ago I treated myself to some lovely Noro yarn, on sale in a very fine wool shop near where I live, which was closing down. Both my loss and my gain. Then a couple of weeks ago I went out with beloved daughter to buy a dress for her for our wedding, and was lured into buying yet more yarn, as one is from time to time.
I felt it only right that the less recent purchase should be knitted up first, so here is the knitting in progress, along with the pattern.
I have to say, I don't think I'll look anything like as fey and girlish in my version, but (and this is very important to me) the cardigan will be symmetrical across the front, not all skew whiff like the illustration in their pattern book. I have puzzled over this for some time; why oh why are all Noro patterns knitted up all any old how in relation to the (absolutely beautiful) colour changes in the yarns? A brief bit of research online found me this little gem of a phrase from the "blurb" on their website.
"Harmonize natural unevenness, asymmetric pattern and complex color to portray the beauty of the nature. Taking sufficient time to dye and yarn natural flavors and tenderness of materials to preserve their original characters"
Well - apart from the delighfully idiosyncratic translation from the Japanese, I guess the "asymmetric pattern and complex colour" explains the lack of symmetry. But when did you last see an asymmetric butterfly, or flower, or bird's wing pattern, or tabby cat's stripes?
Nope, just can't be doing with all of that. My cardigan will have, I hope, perfectly matched colour changes across the front and the sleeves, which will give me great satsifaction. Yes that does require hunting through the remaining balls to find the one which starts as near as possible to the end of the previous one, and cutting out the excess but I can use that up in the collar, so no waste there! And what satisfaction when I finally sew it all together and the colour bands flow across my imperfect body in perfect symmetry!!
We have two lovely cats, Rum and Raisin, who have shared our lives for the past ten or so years. We love them dearly, and feed them far too many biscuits but they are cats, and they do what cats do; catch things. Rum's catches ususally get crunched up on the lawn, though occasionally they are brought in for consumption overnight, with little bits left by the Man's chair in case he's peckish in the morning. Raisin, however, is a bit more squeamish. Once the excitement of the chase and catch is over, he's not quite sure what he should do with this poor wriggling furry thing. So in he comes clattering through the cat flap, a scurry, a yowl or two, and I rush into the kitchen to find a mouse (DBM) cowering under the dresser (where all good mice should hide) and a grumpy fat cat doing his best to get under the dresser. A cat and mouse impasse. I removed the cat, and found things to block up the ends of the dresser so that DBM couldn't escape. However, DBM had escaped already, to hide beneath the bookshelf in the sitting room. Aha, I thought, I can block up the wavy front esdge of the bookshelf with "more things", heavy enough and malleable enough to fit under the wavy bits and leave one small space for DBM to come out. The one small space was, of course, cleverly adapted with a humane mouse trap, baited with rather nice nuts and chocolate biscuits. No problem I thought.
Two days later, having sat each morning listening to little mouse scrabbles, and thinking, "oh, he'll be out soon, tidily captured in the mouse trap" I came down to find that two of the "things" used to block all exits had been wriggeld through and there was no DBM any more. And, to add insult to injury, DBM had been very grateful for the nice feast I'd supplied him, easily accessed by nibbling through the soft corduroy cover that ennables wheat packs to be heated up in microwaves before being applied to sore necks. Perhaps not my best choice for a mouse barrier!
So what does this have to do with the pictures below?
Well, for the next two nights I was awoken several times by little scrabbles and scuttlings in my bedroom. Ye Gods, I thought, DBM has found it's way upstairs and is negotiating the maze of boxes and whotnot under my bed. This is definitely Not Good. The first task, obviously, was to buy more humane mouse traps; the second to move all the boxes out from under the bed, then crawl about, with no thought of dignity, with torch and long poky thing to find the whereabouts of the DBM.
What did I find? A great deal of dust; a pen I'd lost; a single sock; a bookmark; an empy pack of aspirin. I also reacquainted myself with the precious contents of these many and various boxes: old writing cases belonging to Ganna and Mum, stuffed with letters, diaries, account books and the like; a complete handwritten draft of one of Gannas novels, along with the typewritten version that Mum did for her to send to the publishers; a small suitcase with a set of old reel to reel tapes which I know have all of us (me, Mum, Dad, Ganna and Grandad) talking many many years ago in Petersfield when Dad was still alive and playing with his new Grundig tape recorder. And this very fine collection of rug yarns, complete with the canvas (3' x 6') and a handwritten list of the amounts of every yarn there.
Some were easy - just count the drums and you know how many pieces you've got, but I had a vision of Mum sitting and patiently counting out 929 pieces of green, 482 pale pink, 33 dark blue, 2 khaki ...... as all those below were just small remainders, carefully packed into plastic bags to keep them safe.
They have sat there I'd guess, for the best part of the last 40 odd years, kept for "one day" when she would have time to make the next rug. One day never came - it often doesn't, so here they still are, awaiting a hand and a design to make the best use of them, along with the list of amounts, and calculations of how many pieces would be needed to fill that canvas.
But what of the DBM? Not a sign, not the merest twitch of a whisker, nothing. But still, occasionally, I hear a little scratch and scrabble in the middle of the night. Not in my room, no no, in the walls of my room. I assume the wretched creature has found its way in somehow, and is now searching the fabric of the house for more tasty morsels. All we can hope is that a) it doesn't start trying to eat the wires, b) it finds its way outside somehow, without encountering an enthusaustic feline on its journeys and c) it does so very soon, as I'm rather tired of sleeping with one ear cocked just in case it finds its way onto the bed!!
