Wrath

Here I am at big sin number five - Wrath.

The solider, being spurred on by the wrath
of the lion and the whisper of the demon.

Wrath is anger, wrath is rage and destruction - perhaps an appropriate subject to be talking about on the day that some believe with herald Ragnarok (the end of the world as we know it)! The kind of hate that's encompassed by this sin is the sort that'll start a centuries' long feud and set brother against brother. Interestingly, whilst wrath is the only sin not wholly associated with selfishness there is an element of it here; anger directed inwards could easily lead to self-harm and the ultimate sin of suicide, a rejection of god's gifts in the eyes of writers such as Dante.

In Dante's version of the Inferno, the wrathful are consigned to the Fifth circle; the place is a stinking swamp, a swollen artery of the great river Styx. On the torpid surface of the river the actively wrathful  fight one another, whilst below the surface the more sullen lie in wait for any unwary souls who should fall in to join them. Dante went so far as to have another circle of hell for violent sinners, in a deviation (amongst several others) from our outlined structure of iniquity. 

Dore's depiction of Satan.

The great prince of Wrath is non other than Satan himself, whilst others might consider some of the gods of war, such as Mars, as being the personification of the quality. Gods, i.e. male deities certainly being balanced by Goddesses of war. Given that bit of information it is, in some ways, strange to think that by the time of the mediaeval era many people did not believe that women were capable of anger at all, given their cold and wet nature (phlegmatic, as the theory of the four humours would have termed it)!

Slugabed

Look what got out of bed this morning--after some cajoling--my Sloth yarn. Big, lazy, grey and dirty-cloud coloured Corriedale. I added in a scant number of brighter accents to represent dreams (of the sleeping or waking variety) that often accompany laziness and yet are seldom fulfilled.

Here's my lazybones of a yarn, all complete and having a nice
rest before it gets put to work later on.

An idea of scale,

Lazy thing

I knew that sloth had to be grey; like one of those grey days so well summed up by poet Thomas Hood in his famous work written in 1844:

No sun - no moon!

No morn - no noon -

No dawn - no dusk - no proper time of day.

No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease.

No comfortable feel in any member -

No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees.

No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds -

November!

The kind of day that hardly makes you want to leap out of bed but that does inspire you to pull the covers higher, if just for a little longer....so you thought, anyway. With that thought in mind I went looking for inspiration and turned up this picture, on Pintrest, of this yawning woman--sheets all slovenly crumpled up around her--and knew that I'd hit the nail on the head, as it were, in terms of content and colour palette.

Much like the Gluttony yarn, I know I want the finished Sloth to be big and fat and puffy, soft. That, for me, is a challenge in itself; my 'default' yarn gauge i.e.  the one that happens when I'm not consciously thinking about--and trying to make something other than--is more on the medium line. Whilst I did get someway towards it with the chocolatey Gluttony piece I wanted this one to be more so. Having done a bit of research  (in the form of YouTube video searching) it came out that a good fibre choice would be that of the Corriedale sheep - not too scratchy and with a decent amount of crimp that helps with the construction of big, bulky, yarn. Fibre bought I set to work!

Skein of yarn - 2 ply and quite bulky. 

The spinning didn't go too badly at all, I had much more luck with pre-drafting the top first, for some reason, though it's a bit uneven in places. I decided not to worry too much about that, after all this is Sloth we're talking about.  As can be seen in the picture to the left, the natural colour of the fibre is an off-white, creamy, one and I wanted grey so time to dye. My original thought was for a slightly variagated yarn so immersion dyeing the whole lot wasn't going to work. I borrowed an idea from a book on dyeing I got for the holidays - part of the skein is held out of the water for a time, so that the yarn has a different saturation in different places.

The rest of the dyeing process will have to wait for another day, as at the moment I'm without a heat-source (and the weather's certainly not sunny enough to give solar-dyeing a try). So far I'm pleased with how it's turning out - the yarn really did 'bloom' when it dried.

Now here's a thought - the other thing that came to mind right away when I thought of sloth was the animal. Were they so named because they were lazy, or was the condition of being slothful so called because it was reminiscent of the animal? The Latin and Greek names for the animal both mean 'leaf eater' whilst tribes in Ecuador give them names meaning 'sleep', 'eat' and 'dirty'. The last seems especially fitting as--according to the ever helpful Wikipedia--a single sloth can be a home to moths, beetles, cockroaches, fungi and algae! Easy to see why they don't appear in shampoo adverts!

Brown-throated-three-toed-sloth in Costa Rica.

Sloth

An engraving made by Abraham Bosse -
a French artist and etcher. Here we see a rather
cavalier looking gentleman and a lazy ass.

Sloth marks the mid-point in my series of Seven Deadly Yarns and I feel like I'm fighting a touch of apathy; kind of appropriate really, since many mediaeval sources list 'acedia' in place of the more modern terminology. 

Acedia alludes more to the spiritual/emotional side of things - the unceasing Aquinas goes so far as to suggest that acedia is a precursor to other mental instabilities such as restlessness and instability (was there anything other than prayer that the man didn't believe was sinful?) Furthermore, lack of doing something that one was supposed to do was also an act of acedia. This is certainly one easy sin to fall into!

By the time Dante got around to writing Purgatorio--the sequel to the Inferno, and precursor to Paradiso--in the early fourteenth century ideas were changing. It's interesting to see that in Dante's view the slothful are found in purgatory (a place of punishment, not as severe as hell, are sent for a time to atone for their wrongdoings) rather than in the depths of the inferno. Here the souls who were lacking in activity in life are engaged in ceaseless toil, they dash about in a hive of activity...no doubt after which they will be thankful for a good rest.

I already have a fairly clear idea of the end product for my fibery homage to sloth, though that may evolve a little as I go, so more on that next time...now to go and have a pause for thought and collect some more ideas.

The Fourth Circle

Here are the results of my foray into Greed, a creation of soft merino in golden shades (they remind me of goldfish), glittery golden embroidery thread, sequins and just a sprinkle of tinsel. I'm quite pleased with it though I'm sure it could have dripped with more bling!

Sequins and sparkles!

The dragon's treasure or is it a pirate's?

The skein, awaiting its final destiny.

Lay Not Up For Yourselves Treasures

 'Can you hear it ring

It makes you wanna sing

It's such a beautiful thing--Ka-ching!

Lots of diamond rings

The happiness it brings

You'll live like a king

With lots of money and things..'

-- Shania Twain 'Ka-Ching'

Gathering supplies for the finished yarn - dyed merino tops,
sparkly stuff, gold sequins and embroidery thread.

I knew even before the first post for the Greed yarn that the predominant colour for it would have to be golden shades and that there'd have to be a lot of different sparkly stuff in there. I also had a pretty good idea of what the end result was going to look like as well, though the idea did undergo some evolution as I went; the beads that I'd originally imagined turned into shiny, sparkly, coin-like sequins.

Having chosen three different shades of ready dyed fleece (ranging from a sort of maize-like yellow to a coppery-orange) I knew that I wanted to blend them together, to avoid the kind of barber's pole effect that'd been present in the previous yarns I've made for this project. Out came the carding combs! In theory it's simple, fibres go onto the face of the brushes and out of the chaos comes a nice order that can be turned into a rolag. I'm sure there's a knack that I've not yet found out about, something simple that I've been missing. It wasn't as plain sailing as it should have been. The idea is to end up with all of the fibres on one of the carders, so that the fluff can be neatly rolled into a rolag...which I did end up with in the end (though I do feel the need to say that I could spin with the somewhat messy rolags I'd made to date). 

One half of my carders, loaded up with
merino and gold sparkles.

Once the rolags were made they were pretty easy to spin from and I can certainly see the appeal of a blending board (next husband construction project)! The embroidery thread worked out nicely too as a carrier for the sequins - the hardest part with that was avoiding the very fine thread tangling up (mostly by twisting back on itself). I only made a small sample before cracking on with the final skein, though I did add some bits of very sparkly tinsel that weren't part of the plan. 

A couple of the better looking rolags.

At some point I also realised that I'd gotten behind with this blog but hey-ho, on with it now even though the accompanying artwork's not finished and the 'finished' skein just needs the twist setting. 

Greed

'The Worship of Mammon' - by British Pre-Raphaelite
 Evelyn De Morgan, 1909

We have been lustful, we have been gluttonous, shall we be greedy too? Greed is the third of the class 'seven deadly sins' - and it is another pertaining to excesses, rapacious desire for possessions, for wealth. This is one sin on which even that great and illustrious Christian writer, Thomas Aquinas, has a fairly straightforward view: 

"Greed is a sin against God, just as all mortal sins, in as much as man condemns things eternal for the sake of temporal things."

In the New Testament of the Bible, greed is personified by Mammon - a demon - who is sometimes elevated to the exalted position of one of the Seven Princes of Hell (what's with the number seven, anyway?). Dante, too, believed that there was a circle of hell especially designed for those who had been avaricious and wasteful in their lifetimes - within this circle, the fourth by Dante's reckoning, the souls were divided into two teams - those who had hoarded their wealth and those who had squandered it. These teams were locked, for eternity, in a great joust with great weights that they must push with their chests.

Gustav Dore's engraving, showing
the joust with rocks.

One of the most famous of all greedy men must be the legendary King Midas, of Greek mythology. Everything he touched (with his hands) turned to gold, including his hapless daughter.

Greed, in the animal kingdom, could be well represented by the dragon sitting on her mound of gold (think of Smaug, from Tolkien's 'Hobbit', or the thieving magpie, driven by desire for as many shiny things as he can get his beak onto.

Each time I have considered both this post and the yarn to come I'm hit by one word: BLING. Once a term confined to hip-hop culture the word bling (an ideophone of the sound of light hitting silver or other sparkly stuff, supposedly) has made its way into mainstream culture, having been added into the Oxford English dictionary in 2002 and the Merriam Webster in 2006.

Smaug, as imagined by Canadian illustrator  John Howe, who is most famous for his works alongside
Peter Jackson on the Lord of the Rings trilogy and as a consultant on the in-progress Hobbit movies.