There Is No Secret Ingredient

This is something I just added to my profile on Ravelry. I thought about it a while and decided I wanted to put it in a blog post as well.

I know this will sound really odd, but lately I am beginning to understand something important about myself, art, and life. As long as I have been working with fiber, I have always felt that if I could just design like this person, or knit like that person, or weave like so-and-so--or spin like my roommate (!)--THEN I would be a “real” fiber artist. But I never felt that anything I did ever really ‘measured up’ to what other people I know (and love dearly) were able to achieve or accomplish -- my work was just a (distant) second-best, if that.

Slowly, I am beginning to understand something different. It sounds ridiculous to get a deep truth from a children’s movie, but there it was, waiting for me.

“There is no secret ingredient… it’s just you.” Yep. That's right. Kung Fu Panda has a surprising amount of wisdom hidden in there (even though some of the humor tends toward crudeness). There is one scene where Po and Shifu are shouting at each other about whether Po has what it takes to really become the kung fu warrior he has always yearned to be. He says, at one point, in complete frustration, "I thought if there was anyone who could make me not-me, it was you." That's what hit me squarely between the eyes -- just like me, Po thought that the secret of achieving what he dreamed of was to become "not-me" -- to become someone else.

But Po is Po. He can't become Tigress, he can't become Crane, he can't become Monkey. He can learn from them, but he can't be them. He can only become what he already is. Po's strengths are his own, and he learns to fight in a way that is uniquely his.

This is not to say that I can’t learn more, develop my skills, grow, and strive for excellence -- but I am learning that I don’t have to become "not-me" to be a fiber artist. For me to be who I am--and for you to be who you are--is enough.

There is no secret ingredient.

More on cotton...

Short post today. I have dishes, gardening, and grading to do, followed by helping a friend with entries for a flower show and then teaching my evening class.

But I did get a photo of the takli and its first yarn...

The weight of the skein of 2-ply cotton is .5 ounce. I have no idea what the yardage is, because I wound the skein around my elbow when I couldn't find my niddy-noddy. So I suppose it's X number of cubits, but that's not especially helpful, is it? Once I've boiled it, I'll rewind it and measure properly.

Adventures with Cotton

Lately, I've been thinking that I need to explore cotton spinning. I decided that for my own sake, I couldn't really call myself a spinner while saying "but I don't know how to spin X...". Everyone's mileage may vary, of course--loads of excellent spinners don't have that compulsion. It's just how I am.

I decided that cotton would be my summer project, along with exploring tablet weaving and figuring out how to spin from silk 'hankies' or 'bells'. I had tried out someone's takli at a meeting of our spinning group, and I liked it better than my other supported spindle, a bead-whorl spindle with a large amber (?) bead. So I asked for a takli and some Sea Island long-staple cotton for my birthday, and my sweetie gifted me with them.

In a word, I am gobsmacked by takli spinning. This tiny spindle inserts a phenomenal amount of twist into the growing thread, and the twist in turn causes the twisting thread-to-be to pull additional fibers out of the fiber supply in my other hand so rapidly that it literally looks like magic. My friend Jane, watching me spinning at her garden party, said it looked as if I were just conjuring thread out of the air... and she's just about right. That's exactly what it feels like.

What really astonished me is that it's almost faster with a takli than it is with my Ashford. I just went and tried it, and discovered that spinning cotton on my wheel is much easier now that I've learned with the takli; the last time I tried, it didn't go well. This time it worked, IF I let it spin with basically no tension, and then tweaked the tension spring to wind it on the bobbin.

The other big surprise is the amount of yardage I can get with a takli. Two takli-fuls of thread will fill one of my weaving-shuttle bobbins (the short ones); filling the takli four times results in a surprisingly large quantity of two-ply yarn once it's been plied.

I need to add pictures, but I haven't time right at the moment and I need to get a set of exams graded. Hopefully tomorrow I can set up a couple of photos.