Lipstick?

Before the 2008 election brouhaha concerning lipstick and pigs, I was working for a company that made cool science-heavy drug discovery software (I learned a lot of chemistry so obscure that Google had no idea) that was to modern software in terms of look and feel the way DOS is to OS X. As part of its downhill spiral (a year or two of which I was lucky enough to witness from the inside) the new CEO promised to make things better, newer, faster, sexier, more efficient, more profitable, and not just do the equivalent of putting lipstick on a pig.

Yeah that worked out well: more than half the people there when I left have since been laid off, and from what I hear, it hasn't stopped.

Anyway.

There have been classes that I've taught that I've turned into kits, some with more modifications than others. If the instructions contain numerous variations and I don't plan to provide beads for every combination of choices possible, then I need to prune them; conversely if the kit (as is usual) is for a particular item (you can teach a technique class and chat about uses and colour choices and bead choices and finishing, but that's not useful for a kit which needs to have an end goal), the instructions may need to be expanded somewhat.

So for Calathid, which I taught a few months ago, it occurred to me that it might look more interesting and more floral (though still fairly abstract) if I played with colour gradations.

I also needed a better sample for the photo for a class proposal for a national show. I hoped that it wouldn't just be lipstick on a pig.

There are three different colour combinations, and I'm pleased with the results, but this was more effort than I'd been anticipating, and I have to confess that finishing it amounted to quite the act of will and self-discipline (not normally words in my lexicon when it comes to beading or knitting where I'm more likely to fall on the self-indulgent side), as each segment took somewhere between an hour and an hour and a half to complete. (There are eight in total, plus the toggle section).

Before I started, I was considering other colour-ways as well. Now I'm rethinking my Full-Sized Samples strategy.

Painful as it was to complete it, I needed some consolation after my day of spinning on some roving which was very unpleasant; partly my fault and partly not.

Most of the time I buy fibre in small amounts, but every now and again I'll indulge in a sweater-amount if that's the only way it's available.

A few years I bought a large bag of slow-change roving from a vendor from whom I've bought quite a bit, in a colour-way somewhat less saturated and paler than my usual sludge, and I started spinning on Saturday.

I spun all day, almost a full bobbin, and it was full of second cuts (which made lumps) and neps (possibly because not all the lanolin had been washed out). And I hate the colours. When I dug in the bag, along with the lovely mauves, taupes and greens, there were way too many creams and beiges, all of them neppy, all of them sticky with lanolin. The few colours I like? Not neppy, not sticky.

I tried to disregard the annoyance of stopping to pick out neps as I spun, but I couldn't get away from the blah colours, and spent quite a bit of spinning time wondering what would be the best colour with which to overdye it, which in itself is a bit depressing when the whole point of the roving is the supposedly fabulous colour gradation - but I'm sure someone would love it; just not me.

I hate to toss a hundred dollars of fibre, but the spinning is no fun either, and life's too short and the stash is too big to waste time on spinning something that's Not Fun.

I guess what I'll do is separate out the good parts and make pretty yarn that I can use (sport-weight or dk-weight three-ply yarn), and consider spinning the rest of it really quickly into either a fat two-ply or a really fat singles yarn that I'll use for fulling.

I might be able to convince myself that I've been meaning to make bags or baskets or oven-gloves or something.