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.
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.
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.
In general, Vikings isn't doing too badly re accuracy issues, I think. They introduced real things like the sun compass, and they've avoided the whole horned-helmet trope. I was delighted to see Ragnar's wife actually weaving with their daughter on a warp-weighted loom in the first episode. They were weaving from the top down, and beating the fell line upward, which is exactly right. If anyone was spinning, though, I missed seeing it.
What I really wanted, though, was to see a fair number of women surreptitiously spinning and weaving extra fabric for the sail of this boat that Ragnar & Co. are secretly building. No luck there. Sigh... I'd really like some historical drama, sometime, to make that point--that without dozens of women with hand spindles, spinning dawn to dusk, not one Viking ship would ever have tasted saltwater.
SPOILER ALERT!
In this week's episode, I thought they did really well with just how clueless the Norsemen would have been at their first exposure to the monastics at Lindisfarne. It's an interesting take on 'first contact' stories; their reaction was not, "we hate these guys and their religion,"; it was more like, "huh? Why do they have all this gold and stuff, and they're not protecting it?" Another one says, "Maybe they think their god will protect it." The response to that is, with a gesture toward the crucifix on the wall, "If that's their god, then he's dead. Who worships a dead god?" or words to that effect; I don't remember the line exactly. In another building, one of them enters the scriptorium, and is fascinated with this flat crinkly stuff and the marks on it, because he's never seen parchment. He crinkles it, tears it, sniffs it, then discovers that it burns, and cheerfully sets the whole place on fire with pages of manuscript. No textile content here, but intriguing historical issues.
I don't know if there was a king of Norway who actually forbade anyone from exploring westward; it just doesn't ring true for me. They were a pretty opportunistic lot, on the whole, and I just can't see it happening. It seems to be more like an artificially constructed conflict for dramatic purposes, and it's wearing thin already.
