Confetti and more

I can’t lie, this week has been a trial.  For healing and self-care, on Saturday Doc and I decided to go out for burritos and a car wash.  It just seemed like the best thing to do at the time.  When in difficulty, when you can’t think what to do, just get up and put on your shoes, and go do the first thing you can think of:  for us, it was to eat mashed beans with raw onions and bizarrely orange sauce.  I don’t know why it helped, but it did, and anyway, getting the car washed is sort of a reset button.  You go in filthy and covered with salt, and then there’s noise and soap and hot water, and you emerge on the other side all scrubbed and fresh.  Sometimes it’s big things, and sometimes it’s little things, and we do what we can with what we have.  Anyway, I’ve been working on the fleece lately, and turning that enormous pile of hair into yarn is one of the most satisfying things I’m doing these days.  It isn’t the most perfect yarn in the world, not by a long shot, but it is beautiful to me, and it is the loveliest, lightest, warm gray color.   I am trying to spin it woolen style, hopefully with some loft in it.  There is such an endless amount to learn about this process, and the best way I know to learn it is to keep doing it, and maybe that way I’ll figure it out.  I have three big skeins of sportweight yarn now, almost enough to make something, and I tell you I have barely made a dent in the fleece.  Maybe I’ve spun less than a quarter of it?  It feels like it will literally last forever.  I’m going back and forth between wanting to spin it all up first, and then decide what to make with it, or to just do one more skein and dive into the knitting.  I’m a little worried that if I start using the yarn, I might not get around to finishing the fleece.  I keep reminding myself that there is no rush, no rush at all.  

It is such a soothing, comforting process, spinning.  I can buy yarn, but it’s hard to buy comfort.  I keep sentimentally thinking about the sheep who grew this fleece, eating oats and chewing grass, sleeping in the clover.  Loved by two small farmers and their children.  When I was growing up, I sometimes was lucky enough to wake up in a four-poster bed, in a room with roses on the wallpaper and a flock of sheep, grazing in a meadow outside the open window, musing to each other from beneath the pear tree.  I feel such a tenderness for sheep.  I think all knitters probably do.  

With any luck, in a few weeks, there may be warm enough days that I can wear this.  It is Confetti, by Veera Valimaki (the pattern is here) knit from my stash in Madelinetosh Tosh Sock “Gossamer” and Zen Yarn Garden Superfine Fingering “Kind Hearted”.  The “Kind Hearted” says it’s a One of a Kind, but I see at least seven other projects on Ravelry using it, so I don’t know.  Anyway, it is one of those sublimely beautiful multicolored skeins I always fall for but then don’t know how to use.  This little sweater has solved that problem for me.

Watching those colors unfold and stack up next to each other was such a pleasure.  This is the best use of multicolored sock yarn I can imagine.  I am scouring the stash for more options now.  

The snow continues to fall.  The land and the sky are white.  Better days are ahead.   I spin, I knit, I cuddle my blushy little dog.  I eat burritos and get the car washed, and wait.