Sharing the Skeins

Recently a friend and I decided to ‘go together’ on some yarn. Both of us use fibers in our work – but we also make items that are small enough that we would never need a whole skein of yarn. So how to get some new and exciting yarn to use without buying yards and yards of it? We picked out two skeins at two different stores. The first yarn was called ‘seaweed’ and was a beautiful variegated skein in colors from brown to green. This is painted yarn, which I don’t think I’ve ever encountered before. Here’s the kicker – this skein had 600 yards of yarn (what did I say about not buying yards and yards?). That’s a LOT of yarn to divvy up between the two of us. Fortunately, when we looked closely we realized that we could cut it and then separate it out. You can see from the top of this picture that it was quite twisted at times. We would pull apart the strands and then come to a section that was totally twisted and had to be sorted strand by strand. The good part of all of this is we got to keep handling this lovely yarn.

The next skein was much smaller – but much more diverse in color. As you can see from this picture – there were lots and lots of color sections in this skein. So we each took sections, marked off the color section, cut it and then cut that section in half. Some portions were quite short, others were much longer. There were the two of us measuring these strands along a yardstick and trying to carefully sort them out and wind them up. What we ended up with is a riot of color and I know that both of us will find many uses for these colorful fibers.

There’s something so lovely about ‘touching’ ribbons and fibers – I can hardly keep my hands off of fluffy yarns, colorful fibers and floating ribbons. This adventure in sharing not only gave me great additions to my ‘stash’ but it pleased me to be able to sort through these natural fibers which had been woven, dyed, painted just for us!

"I like light, color, luminosity. I like things full of color and vibrant". - Oscar de la Renta