I got home today and discovered two lovely blue packages on my doorstep – the yarn I ordered from Colourmart! Two kilograms of a wool/cashmere/lurex mix, about 4500 yards per pound. It’s a softly twisted singles yarn, loosely plied with a strand of Lurex. It’s a deep garnet, bordering on Bordeaux, and the Lurex (which is the same color) provides understated sparkle. It’s just gorgeous.
This is making me revisit the cloak idea – I love the idea of a handwoven cloak, I adore the color, and I think it would be beautiful woven up with a black warp. (I’d also like to use up this yarn, since 2 kg is a lot to store.) I could conceivably use it as a background for more intricate work – or I could just have a gloriously beautiful handwoven cloak. Either would be fine with me. 🙂
I’m also eager to be weaving something. I like working with my hands, and if I don’t get enough hands-on fiber time, I start getting cranky and irritable. Because of the book proposal, I really haven’t had any fiber time since I left on my museum trip on April 2 – so that’s four weeks without fiber, which is a really long time for me. So I am becoming increasingly tempted just to throw some warp on the loom and weave some yardage, just to get my fiber “fix”. Perhaps some ideas will come to me as I weave.
Countering that idea is the fact that the deadline for the Convergence Fashion Show is maybe nine months away. If I intend to enter a Major Piece, I need to quit diddling around and get to work on it now. If I weave up fabric at random, I’ll definitely run out of time to enter the Convergence Fashion Show. Does that matter? I think probably not – (1) I’m probably already too late getting started, (2) if I find a publisher, the book will take priority anyway, and (3) I’d prefer to do my work at my own pace, without the tyranny of show deadlines. Getting a piece designed and completed in only nine months is certainly do-able – I think Autumn Splendor took about that long – but it would be a bit of a stretch, and I wasn’t trying to write a book, the last time I tried it!
So on the whole I think I can put visions of Convergence out of my head, at least for 2014.
That leaves the question of whether to continue working on the Phoenix Rising design or whether to “just weave”. I’m inclined to do both – put a 20-yard warp on the loom and “just weave” this gorgeous yarn into some yardage, while working out the design for Phoenix Rising. That will get me my fiber “fix” and allow me to continue designing. And who knows, I may get some inspiration along the way!