Enchanting Juno

She's so fine, there's no telling where the money went.

At Christmas we went to the zoo.

This is near my mother, an excellent small zoo just the right size for people under five to enjoy a refreshing and adventurous day and not be quite tired enough to cry on the way back to the car.  We saw lots of excellent things like a rhinoceros, and giraffes eating Christmas trees.  There were monkeys.  And an anteater.  The giant tortoise was hiding and my nephew fed the ducks with shaky hands and nervous shrieking laughter. The coi, no dummies, tracked the path of children along the pond's edge waiting for the inevitable bounty.  Sometimes they even beat the ducks.

Just before the ducks, and after the parrots, we walked around a corner and saw these. 

Flamingos, subjects of a million pink plastic lawn tchotches, they've become some kind of shorthand for kitsch.  When I wanted to annoy my fastidious neighbor I considered a pink flamingo for the front step.  What was I thinking?

They are beautiful, so astonishingly beautiful with a thousand impossible shades of coral and pink and vermilion knees, the s-curve of their necks as they drank and the blackness of their beaks and the ripples of light in their feathers and the Seussian spindle legged feather puffs of them as they slept.

They sorta stuck with me, in this brilliant mind's eye picture, I haven't the words for it exactly, but this moment of breath lost, this moment of unexpected drenching beauty, this moment of expanded perception, these birds.  (Not for the first time I realized that human beings can be oddly reluctant to fully embrace the beauty of the world and the wickedness too.  We settle for the pink plastic lawn version too much.  What is up with that?)

Naturally, I could not resist the exact deep glowing Flamingo coloured-ness of this.  Because when you can express memory and perception in yarn, you so totally should.

Yes, that's the same yarn vendor Steph blogged last week.  Yes, I am a sheep.  Yes, you can bite me. (And yes, that is the vendor's picture.  1 million tries got me 1 million pictures of bright eye-searingly pink yarn.  Nothing like the real thing.)

469 yards, 70% superwash merino, 30% silk.  It is divine. The color is as brilliantly varied and yet harmonious as the inspirational feathers, and the silk is giving it the tiniest halo while I work with it.  I want more.  Given my history with socks (ugly, abortive, brief), probably not a fiscally prudent idea.  But the desire is there.

Yes, Lisa, I said sock. 

Really.  It is even a bit bigger now. 

A Loksin actually.  Baa. 

(In strict accuracy, I had long ago (January) decided that my next attempt at a sock would be a Loksin.  I swear it.

(I find them perfectly charming, particularly once I stopped spelling them Loskin).

This was after a recent sock attempt that went awry.  (I never told you. There was some gauge trouble.  It was very sad.  It is 'resting' now.) 

It was just the flamingo yarn that moved me to start (and who could blame me?) 

But one cannot deny the influence of strange outside forces upon one's behavior.  No matter how much one might like to claim complete autonomy in one's desires and actions.  (Ahem.)

So great yarn, great pattern, not-so great sock knitter.  It is going.  But nobody hold their breath or anything, I'd feel responsible if anything happened.

 

Good Stuff.

So I didn't go to Maryland S&W.  Or Connecticut.  Nor will I go to New Hampshire this coming weekend.  I would actually like to go to NH but I can't face the drive this year.  Between gas prices and available time, I just can't.   I'm going to spend the gas money on dirt and flowers and spend some of next weekend grubbing in my back yard.

Instead I hope to go to SOAR again in the fall.

The festivals are truly wonderful, particularly as a way to connect with what I like to call the like-mindedly odd, and of course to shop.   They can encourage frenzy in the unprepared.  Or even the prepared with insufficient emotional resources.
If I needed to supplement the wool erupting in every corner of my house. 
Which I really don't. 
I had friends over last week and I was showing off stash - the way one does (Or is that just me?) - and I just got kinda flummoxed.  I have at least three fleeces unwashed in my kitchen in the corner (Maybe the garden grubbing can be supplemented with some fleece washing?)  At least 5 processed into roving.  One three that are washed but still locks or partially locks or half carded.  It goes on.
And that doesn't count the bags from the Spinning Bunny, the roving from the Woolen Rabbit, Spinners Hill, Buckwheat Bridge, Carolina Homespun, Spunky Eclectic, Abby Franquemont.  All gorgeous and inspirational materials.

This is just off the top of my head.  And does not include yarn.  And I do not have the least among stashes, if you dig what I am saying. (Is this like every stash reduction post in blog land?  I hope not.  As a note, I am comfortable collecting wool as a hobby, but want to collect not heedlessly grab and horde.   Fine line sometimes?)

Perspective, children, is what I need.  Perspective and goals (I suck at goals, my whole life I have sucked at goals. So maybe intent is a better word.)

Perspective and Intent.

I love fiber.  I want it to continue to be a force for good in my life.  Which means it can not always be a primary line item in my budget, an excuse for heedless acquisition without purpose or a place to hide from the rest of my life.
Sometimes that's what hobbies are, a refuge.  And that is good, shelter from the storm is essential.
But it can go wrong too - I was watching some frenzy of acquisition on some board somewhere recently, someone gnashing and weeping because she had missed out on some exclusive yarn somewhere and I was startled to discover that I understood her upset.  My rational mind was all - dude that's crazy, it's yarn - and my irrational mind was all - let me corner the market on this, my preciousssss.
This was right around when I chased down some rare sock yarn last week.  Because you know, I am SUCH a sock knitter.
But it tied into what I have been thinking about recently, about that perspective and intent.  I'm not 14 any more.  I don't give a shit that I am not a cool kid.  I have LOTS of shoes and yarn and more importantly, a home and friends and family and thoughts and dreams and hopes and the best cat in the world.  I woke up in a pool of sunlight in the first world, I am tall and strong and healthy and I am so fucking lucky I can hardly look at it sometimes.

But there have totally been times I was in danger of pulling the refuge in after me, of having the shelter become a cage, of becoming so obsessed with the tangibles of fiber stuff that I forgot the intangibles of it, the depth that is possible, to appreciate, to see.   Forgetting that there will always be something else exquisite to discover, always be another fleece, another yarn.   I hate that me, that forgetting, greedy me.

For this to work, I need to learn, I need to have balance and I need to be traveling somewhere - and I don't mean New Hampshire.  I mean if I try and have every festival, every moment crammed in, I won't SEE any of it.  I mean I need to take the learning and DO something with it. 
I need to knit a sweater that challenges me. 
Spin more than 3 ounces of a single fiber.  Knit something with it.
Learn to use the knitting machine that's been behind the couch for 2 years. 
Sew up some of the fabric piled in the guest room, be damned to mistakes.

Be damned to mistakes is it, really.  No one is imperiled by my fiber mistakes.  Not even me.

I read something great about mindfulness recently and if I could remember where I would give you a link - but she made the point that mindfulness wasn't getting it right every time, it was trying as much as possible, making small corrections, failing sometimes and keeping the arc of progress going even when intent falters in a moment.

So SOAR is my choice this year, to learn and apply that learning, to find inspiration and the tools to follow it somewhere, instead of every festival in a chaotic spring of blurred experience.  Less buying (Notice I don't say NONE), more using.  Lots of talking to people.  Maybe some beer.  Moments savored not gulped.  Sunlight.  Sheep pictures.  Laying on the grass.

Still going to Rhinebeck though. 

Come ON.