Progress up the sides of the box. This is the FUN part! I am having a blast, and it is hard to tear myself away from it.

About the yarns: most of these yarns were given to me by a weaving teacher. Apparently what happened was that a student had wound the warp for a large rug, and then had abandoned the project. Once a warp is measured off, you can’t really wind it up again because it will become a terrible tangle. Since she knew that I weave tapestry and can use cut lengths of yarn, she gave it to me. I cut off the ends and wound the lengths into balls. I can’t remember how long this took, but I must’ve had the patience of Jesus to do it. The wool is very coarse and must have been hand dyed, because there are undyed or lightly dyed places where the ties on the yarn were too tight. This wool would probably have been thrown out had I not taken it.

One of the yarns is leftover from an old tapestry that I wove many years ago. I remember that I dyed it on the porch at Lake Waccamaw, during a week when I was at the lake without a car, phone, or TV, with only the company of our dog, Janet Planet. It rained buckets non-stop for days, to the point that the rainwater rose up through the kitchen floor, the house having been built directly on top of a cement slab. It was one of the best weeks of my life.

This is an example of Slow Cloth, which I’ve been thinking about a lot, and will eventually post about. I’m thrilled that fiber artists are extending the philosophy from the Slow Movement to cloth. Of course, many of us always have, but I never thought of it in those words. How perfect!