The Internet Travelogue

July 21, 2005

Spin Doctor: Interesting Yarn The Fibre of Community

"Crap fibre yeilds crap yarn."

I knew that knitting people had their own subcultures. But who knew there was a vivacious yarn spinning subculture which is warm, irreverent and as tragically hip as The Devil Wore Prada? But the Yarn Harlot shows us this is so:

Crap fibre depresses you, frustrates you and encourages you to give up and (in the less determined) could cause a fledgling spinner to wander off entirely, thinking that they obviously aren't meant for this...given that they keep turning out crap yarn. Even the best spinner is going to end up with crap yarn if you start with crap fibre, except at least they are going to know why they apparently suck so hard.

Luckily, there is a practice among spinners, an unspoken code of fibre giving. When a previously normal person gets sucked into the inevitable hole takes up spinning, it is common practice for every other spinner within earshot of the event to take a moment, scour the fibre stash and send a little bit of something wonderful off to inspire the intrepid newbie. Guilds do it, pressing delicious samples on the learner, clubs do it, and the internet does it with gusto, often inundating the newly pledged with bits and pieces of wonderful things, merino, silk, flax and cotton all show up on your doorstep, hand-dyed, plain, roving, sliver, bumps....it is all pressed into your grateful hands with only the lovely phrase "here, try this" to accompany it. The new spinner tries all these things, gets experience, and learns what they like and may invest in.

Posted by joel at 12:55 PM | Comments (0)

October 28, 2004

The Tsar's Colors

The library of congress has an amazing collection of color photographs from Tsarist Russia called The Empire That Was Russia. Photographer to the Tsar Prokudin-Gorskii developed an ingenious photographic technique for capturing color photographs using three near identical black and white exposures of the same scene. Each exposure had a different colored filter in front of the lense (one red, one green and one blue). Today those negatives have been recombined using a digital process, and the result is photographs of pre-soviet Russia which are almost erie in their immediacy and humanity. It gives you an erie feeling to view in vibrant color people and places which were photographed almost 100 years ago. You must check this one out.

Posted by joel at 11:21 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)