A felted story

I've been doing alot of yarnart lately. Knitting and crocheting and felting. I've written here of some of that. The reality of my life's affect on this old church chikster became blatantly obvious Friday.

I continue to find felting interesting. But, every item turns out as if it has a mind of its own. The one bag that came out with a brain tumor protruding from its base was operated on by my Dr. Fiskars and refelted. It survived the surgery, i am happy to say, but the second felting shrunk it yet again, and so now, it resides in a SSchool class in the dressups for dolls. Yes, NOT the dressups for the sweet children, the DOll Dress up. How sad is that?

Staff are very supportive of my ventures. That's love, baby, pure and simple. They say things like,
"Wow! you made another something!! woo hoo!! "

One loving friend said, "Hey, I saw a purse JUST like that in a real store!" I raced right out to that store and looked and she was right. .....

Well, sort of. The colors were different,the design not the same, and they had a funky hairy something around the top but other than that, they could have been twins.

So I added some funk and brought it back to work.
" Wow!! You made a NOTHER something!!" "Woo Hoo!"

See what I mean, readers? Love love love. I used those same words and tones with my own children when they brought home art from school that was so creative it couldn't be named.

I distinctly recall using that same supportive banter when one of my daughters created her first recipe. It was for Limon cookies. Limon. So that's what "limons" taste like. It was not lemon, that is for sure. The cookie recipe had flour, an egg and salt, if I recall. It crunched like a bite of recently poured concrete would, and the texture wasn't far from that same thing either. But I will tell you this- that was the most wonderful cookie I have ever eaten then or since. She wrote the recipe down in my cookbook, so we'd remember it. She beamed and glowed and had such fun doing that project- all of that tasted better than sweet.

back to yarn....

Someone suggested I take orders and I freaked. I could never take an order for these yarn objects, because I have no idea how the end product will look. They are all accidents. pure and simple.

My office neighbor suggested we tag the two most recent accidents and call the company
"Accidentals". I love it. She's making a couple of tags for them. and I've donated them to the upcoming Bizarre Bazaar. Not Bizarre in a bad way, but in a- "How the heck do they DO this every year? "way. We'll see if we get any takers.

Meanwhile, I had a revelation. As I first mentioned, in this writing, I was slapped in the face with the reality of my age and habits. Did you know that even if you've done 56,869 loads of wash in your lifetime, and even if you loaded the wash, turned it on , waited til the cycle was done, so you could then roll over the wet laundry to the dryer- even if EVEN IF you have done that process consistently all your laundrying life- There is actually NO, I say, NO Law that requires you to wait for the full cycle before lifting the lid of the washer.

My mother taught me to NEVER lift the lid. ALWAYS wait. She showed me an article once in Look magazine about a girl who did the unthinkable- she lifted the washer lid in mid cycle and her arm was jerked off of her body and was not successfully surgically reattached.

She went through life with one arm shorter than the other and wouldn't you know it would be the arm she used and needed the most? She wrote shorter poems, couldn't complete long division problems in math, all this after the accident, and she had to sit closer to the kitchen table to eat her meals, AND saddest radish of all - when she waved, no one saw her in the crowd. All. Her. Life. and All because she lifted the washer lid in mid cycle. So says Look magazine. ( The photo is forever engraved on my brain mass)

So says my Mother ( with a few enhanced details that were no doubt aimed at improving my behavior and manners and school performance) and so, dually impressed by this information, i followed the no -lift rule.

Until, at the ripe age of 52, after investing thousands of pennies into skeins of wool yarn, and after shrinking hundreds upon thousands of indescribable items, I began to wonder. and the wonder pulled me right up out of my big red chair one night and tugged me into the kitchen and , my friends, I found myself standing straight up and facing my washing machine, who was on at the time and working splendidly- felting something.

Well, I lifted the lid. I pulled out the object. and I realized that if I checked these things while they were in the felting process, iImight just be able to catch some of them before they sized down to fit Thumbalina. It was an exciting revelation!

And, as the myths I had been living all those many years, began to melt away, I wanted to find that young girl of all those years ago and tell her that i was sorry for what happened to her arm, and maybe we could be friends.

Well, actually, if I find her, maybe I'll just send her a felted purse.