Brains? Brains!! Braiiiiiins!!!

Gory wool

It’s been a hectic month, with not much posting from Yours Truly. I have a pretty good excuse, though–I got married! And so far, married life is pretty wonderful, with loads of great surprises. And more than a little paperwork. Eh, whaddaya do?

Anyway, I thought it might be nice to get some normal Maus stuff back on track, and dyed up some roving this morning. A coworker had given me her late mother’s fiber stash, along with several very nice balls of white milled wool. They looked like they would take dye very well, so I mixed up some black and red Jaquard dyes for a nice blended black-cherry sort of thing…

Black Cherry Roving
The roving turned out really nice, good and saturated!

While I was adding the red dyes, the pot looked rather…ominous…

Gory wool
What’s in that pot, Maus? What is it? Wool, you say? You sure? It looks…not good…

Sure enough, the minute I put up the photo on my facebook page, all my friends started weighing in with, “That looks…gory!” “It looks like brains!” “Entrails!” “Don’t lie to us, Ms Maus, you put brains in there, didn’t you?” “Brains!!”

So, for the record, I did not stick brains, entrails, or any other unnatural substance in with my lovely, gory looking wool. Because then it would be terribly sticky and hard to clean. Also hard to spin and knit. Gore is nobody’s friend in the fiber arts, my darlings.  Though what goes into my gumbo recipes? Wellllll…

 

 

Beautiful or grotesque?

This time of year I start thinking about the Halloween yarns I enjoy making. Every year it’s something different and and interesting. Sometimes it’s a traditional yarn in pleasing fall colors, or deep reds and blacks with glo-thread, or some wonderful weirdo thing with skulls and little fake bones and silk shreds. This year, I think a big-fun zombie yarn with unsetlling silk cocoons may well be my thing…

Silk cocoons
Olive green silk cocoons…beautiful, and a little disturbing…

I love this olive color. They could be really striking, strung with beads and pearls in an elegant yarn, or perhaps something more seaweedy and pirate-y. There are some pretty fun possibilities here, for sure. Creature from the Black Lagoon? Yay! Unsettling eyeballs? Definitely! Zombies? Why, sure!!

I’m also thinking seriously about adding a few surprise gift-boxes in the Etsy shop. Perhaps a box with a few random, interesting mini-skeins, an ounce of random cool fluff or maybe a knitted critter. I love surprise boxes myself, so I reckon it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to offer for other people. Plus, it would be so much fun to pack them up! I could add little handmade stationary cards, or an odd polymer clay dollhouse figurine, or tiny spindles with eensy-weensy yarns wrapped around them. I’d love to know what people might enjoy in a surprise box coming from me…

Meanwhile, maybe I’ll play with the cocoons a little this afternoon, and see how they combine with a few other fluffy things..hehhehhehhhhhh…