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.

The Third Circle

An illustration by a low-countries born artist,
Giovanni Stradano, dated 1587 showing the
Third Circle and the "hellhound" Cerberus.

According to Dante there were nine circles of Hell, each reserved for a particular type of sinner; the Third circle was for those who had been unrepentant gluttons in life. In that wretched place the unfortunate souls were watched over by the many-headed hound, Cerberus, whilst they lie insensate to the plights of their neighbours even whilst they indulge in all the pleasures that put them there in the first place. 

I shall let that fearsome creature of myth and legend watch over my personal skein of Gluttony, which is now complete. In the end some of the ideas that I'd had, including incorporating cellophane wrappers into the yarn itself, didn't make the cut - either due to technical issues or aesthetic ones; for example I decided that in making the Wensleydale locks more prominent they stood in for the splashes of colour that I'd hoped the wrappers would represent, I also liked the curly, bouncy, texture that they added.  I've also included a photo, for scale, of the yarn alongside a coin (about the same size as an American quarter).

I found it to be quite a challenge, or at least a change of pace, to spin something as full as this - usually the yarn I've made has been at least a little leaner than this, if not aiming to be a skinny weight thing. I had the wheel set on a lower twist ratio and had to do much less drafting (drawing out of fibres), though I did discover that it was better and easier to do some predrafting to prevent the yarn from being too dense. The locks themselves weren't too hard to work with, though they were quite tangled together and not all easy to untangle to use -- they do seem to be in there nice and firmly though I have no idea if I did it correctly...though there are no spinning police! (Something I read somewhere and liked the sentiment of).

The finished ball of yarn, happy with the finished colour.

Detail showing the tasty little morsels
 of colour amongst the chocolate.

Bite-sized

Just a couple of pictures, today, a little bite rather than a whole slice - here's a picture of one of the test yarns that I've been working on; this was a practice run for a fatter, bulkier, yarn that worked out quite well in the end (and I quite like the colours as well):

Big bulky yarn, if I'd thought at the time I'd have taken a photo alongside something for scale,
 will do for the finished yarn.

Having got the technique more or less sorted I went on to spin the finished yarn, here's a shot of it on the bobbin - finished pictures soon to follow.

Probably the 'funkiest' yarn yet to come off my spinning wheel.

Truly Scrumptious

Here's my revised artwork - much more like I was wanting, fewer colours and more emphasis on the chocolate.

I've been working on the above piece of art, in the end I did get much closer to the richness and silky depth of browns that I was hoping for in the first. I've also restricted the other colours to ones that I'm actually going to use in the finished yarn. 

Enough to say that the tub isn't
nearly as full now.

In addition to the dyed merino tops I added some of the following things into the mix - dyed Wensleydale locks, they're very soft and curly, and I also added a sprinkling of wrappers from a helpful tub of candies... chocolates, something that came as an idea towards the end of the sample process. It seemed a fun and interesting idea at the time, the idea of actually putting in the sweet wrappers and they did stay in the ply better than I thought they would -- however, I don't really like the effect; they look good when seen from the outside, with the bright labels, but the foil insides don't look so good. I'm resolved to only add in bright, jewel-like, cellophane wrappers on the finished article. 

The fleece of the Wensleydale
sheep - seen on the sheep. My
locks have been dyed.

The shades of brown work really well and I don't hate the sample that I've made, but it's not right yet - the cable-plying did take away some of the bulk, the volume, that I was wanting so it's back to the drawing board on that one - I'm not considering adding plump bobbles of brown to an already chunky yarn and see what that ends up looking like. The next sample might not be done in the shades for this yarn, as it's a technique test, rather than a colour one this time around. Anyway, here's the sample of the yarn so far. I might need to go buy another box of chocolates, the ones that have the cellophane wrappers...

Cadbury's wrapper there, the green and orange/peach looking curls
are the Wensleydale locks.

Food of the gods or bitter water?

Chocolate, what more need be said?

There are so many types of food and/or drink that I could have chosen to work with for my gluttony inspired yarn, though I knew from the outset that I needed to narrow things down. It wasn't a very difficult choice for me - and that choice was reinforced by a trip to the supermarket today; I wandered down the aisle marked 'seasonal' and was (only slightly surprised to be) confronted with bar after bar, box after intriguing and enticing box of chocolates! It's as if the gastronomic excess of the season is summed up in those little brown squares.

Chocolate is made from the processed seeds of the Theobroma cacao tree and has been cultivated for more than a millennium in central America and Mexico; the ancient Aztec people made a drink they called  xocolātl [ʃo'kolaː- translated as 'bitter water', if things had stayed that way chocolate would hardly be the 'food of the gods' we think of today. 

The colour palette for my next yarn has to be rich, tempting, melted chocolate brown - sweet, creamy, milk chocolate and bitter, high cocoa content, dark chocolate. I want to bring a little relief from the chocolate-brown, but don't worry it won't be too wholesome. My inspiration for the other colours is taken from candies and the pop of their colours. I found this picture of rainbow pinwheel cookies, on Pintrest, and couldn't resist sharing it here - it seems to sum up the essence of sugar-candy, all those overly bright pinks, blues, and the sprinkles around the outside edge? Do you have toothache yet? The longing for salt?  I have some ideas of how I'll incorporate tasty little snippets of colour amongst the dark, seductive, whole.

I'd already done some work on an illustration to go with this installment and here it is, well a part of it -  though it is mostly finished I decided, after some thought and discussion, to leave it as is and begin anew. The image I'd come up with, whilst fine for gluttony in general weren't quite what I was going for...and the background was too busy....and the colours weren't quite right either!

A portion of the original artwork I was doing for this post.

The yarn for this part of the SDY (Seven Deadly Yarns) has to be big and fat, chunky. I'm thinking of making a yarn with more plies (strands that are twisted together to form the finished yarn) than I'd usually go with but will have to test it to see how that goes - read that adding more plies can actually compact the yarn, rather than add to the overall bulk but that's what spinning samples is for! I've chosen my main colours and the accents as well - as last time the primary fibre that I'll be using is merino, it's good and soft and readily avaiable in a whole chocolate-box full of colours. For the accents I have hand-dyed (though not by me this time around) Wensleydale locks - that's the curly fleece of a type of sheep, not a cheese! I have a few other ideas as well but will have to see how those play out too. The photo below shows a colour-sample of the merino, posing alongside a rather tasteful (and tasty) looking bar of chocolate that came of this morning's 'research' trip.... ahem.

Gluttony

An advertisement for indigestion pills but rather
than discouraging the poor soul from over-eating
 these do the opposite - go ahead and make a pig
 of yourself, these pills will fix it all.

Gluttony, the second of the Seven Deadly Sins, is fairly straightforward in concept. Gluttony, as seen with the lens of modernity, would obviously refer to an excess of food and/or drink though some have interpetted it as an excess of anything.

For the purposes of my project I'll be swallowing the food and drink idea. So, to eat too much, to drink too much, those things make a person a glutton! In the middle-ages there were deeply ascetic Christians (such as the famous Italian, now a saint, Thomas Aquinas) who proposed that there were further levels of gluttony to be observed; he went on to outline a whole six ways in

 which gluttony could manifest:

• Praepropere – eating too soon
• Laute – eating too expensively
• Nimis – eating too much
• Ardenter – eating too eagerly
• Studiose – eating too daintily
• Forente – eating wildly

It seems to me that Mr. Aquinas was rather keen to find further ways in a which a person could sin, as if there weren't enough easy pit-falls for a God-fearing citizen to fall into. I also wonder how eating 'too daintily' could be considered gluttonous, as when thinking of a dainty-eater I imagine someone who has the appetite of a small bird...not a gannet!  

Speaking of pigs - here Gluttony is personified
by this amply-figured lady wielding both flagon
and goblet, with her prized porker at her side. Oh yes,
the little demon on her shoulder most likely whispers
'go on, you know you want MORE!'

In 1589 a studious German bishop, by the name of Peter Binsfeld, went so far as to compile a list that associated each of the deadly sins with a specific demon - he firmly believed that the great demon Beelzebub was the prince of Gluttony. As an interesting aside, the same man who died before his sixtieth birthday, also rose to become an authority on demons and one of the most well known witch-hunters of his era (he wrote the treatise De confessionibus maleficorum et sagarum (Of the Confessions of Warlocks and Witches). 

In the next installment I shall be spreading out some of my plans for the next deadly-yarn, for your consumption. Don't get too greedy now...

The Second Circle

 The first of my 'seven deadly yarns' is now complete and here it is! One skein of very soft merino, Tussah silk and black lace yarn coming in at around 85 yards, I think. I'm quite pleased with it, though adding in the snippets of lace--in the way that I did--proved to be quite irritating; having cut the lace into suitably sized pieces I threaded them onto the spool of spun silk with the intent of sliding them along as I went, adding them into the ply that way. The lace bunched up and I had to stop, a lot, to ease it along and straighten out the next piece to be used.

Here it is, the finished skein of Lust - Merino, Tussah silk and black lace.

It's my goal to try at least one new technique out with each of the yarns that I have planned -- in this one there were two; adding in the scraps of lace and spinning pure silk (until now I've only used it blended with other fibre).

Soft yarn, soft black leather.

Ideas for the next sinful encounter of the fibre kind are already developing - the next installment of my blog will be about GLUTTONY.

Passion

"... But to that second circle of sad hell,

Where ‘mid the gust, the whirlwind, and the flaw

Of rain and hail-stones, lovers need not tell

Their sorrows. Pale were the sweet lips I saw,

Pale were the lips I kiss’d, and fair the form

I floated with, about that melancholy storm." -- John Keats

 

From the poem 'On a Dream' in which Paolo (one of the characters in the famous Dante' Aligiheri's 'Divine Comedy') reflects on his circumstance in the Second Circle of Hell, where those filled with Lust are sent. Here the souls of the sinners are blown hither and thither by violent storms, without rest, to reflect their lack of self-control in life.

Merino top and a sample of the Tussah Silk ready for spinning.

I started! Chose some suitable colours of super-soft merino tops and tussah-silk - a type of silk spun by the Tussah moth in China, the cocoons are harvested from the wild after the moths have left them. I had a few ideas in mind of what I wanted the finished yarn to look like and began making some samples...some aspects of which went more smoothly than others. 

The first sample, merino plied with silk, shown off on the
Niddy Noddy made for me by my husband.

At first I was convinced that the result was too stripey, that I would try a more blended look to the whole thing so off I went with my carding-combs to try something else...only to discover that, by the next morning, I liked my first sample much more than I had originally. I suppose you could say that it had grown on me! I went ahead with the second test, though, and ended up with a lovely marbled look that reminded me of either bacon or a nice rib-eye steak. I then was stuck for a while with wondering which was actually better, or rather which I preferred as there wasn't technically anything wrong with either of them.

Sample number two - a more marbled/blended looking thing.

Here's a glimpse of the second sample - which also had a softer, fluffier, appearance to it due to the blending and then being spun from rolags (swiss-roll or jelly-roll-like things) rather from the straight tops. The texture was something else that, in the end, had me sticking with the look of the first sample that I'd made.

I also had a couple of different kinds of lace to try adding into the mixture but I have to leave a little something as a surprise for the end! Suffice it to say, one of them worked out a lot better than the other.

Lastly, a piece of art inspired by my progress thus far - next stop, the finished skein.

Lust

My first challenge, to design and create a yarn inspired by that most pervasive, persuasive, and perhaps perverse of sins - lust, or luxuria as it was listed back in the days when the list was first being drawn-up.

Hieronymous' Bosch work 'Seven Deadly Sins and Four Last Things'
thought to have been painted, oil on wood, around 1500.

Here, in a portion of a painting by the famous Dutch painter, Hieronymous Bosch, we're shown these people engaging in the sin of 'luxuria'. Obviously there's food and drink a-plenty, and music too if the harp on the floor's anything to go by. One can only speculate as to the antics of some of the other folk! What is clear, though, is that Bosch's concept extends beyond the sexual and into the desire, to excess, of anything sensual, to the luxurious. Slaanesh, sometimes known as The Prince of Pleasure, from the mythos of 'Warhammer 40k' would be Luxuria deified.

In thinking about these things I realised that it would be all too easy to end up with a finished yarn that could easily double for many of the other sins, especially those of greed or gluttony, and so I have decided to focus on the more modern interpretation - the sin of the flesh, carnal appetites. Yes, I know, that traditionally 'carnal' simply means 'of the flesh' and that greed, gluttony etc could both be said to be 'of the flesh as well' but I have to draw the line somewhere!

In some regards those sins to do with the senses, with look and with touch, are--to me--those most easily rendered in fibre form. After all, what first attracts us to a new skein of yarn other than its colour? We see it hanging on a peg, or see a ball nestling nicely on a shelf all bright and jewel-like, or rich and earthy, and we hurry over....what do we do next? We have to feel it of course, we imagine how soft (or perhaps not??) it would feel against the skin and we're hooked. Colour is such a powerful thing, it's all around us and speaks to the most primitive parts of the brain.

Colour forms an important part in attracting a potential mate, whether this is brightly coloured baboon behinds or in the hundreds upon thousands of cosmetic products that are now available to adorn our bodies. So what colour is lust?

Alluring baboon bottom, well...alluring to other
baboons.

Red was the obvious choice - the colour of Valentine's roses, love-hearts and all of that stuff but on further contemplation I decided on ruddy pinks, soft skin and the likes as these are shades I usually choose to work with. To compliment these shades I'll be choosing soft fibres, something with some lustre to it - silk maybe. These will be the 'body' of my yarn, and for interest...well, I'm going to try and dress it up with a cheeky bit of black lace.

I'm going out at the weekend to pick up some supplies, I'm looking forward to getting started - that's what'll be in the next installment! There'll be wool, and silk and art.

A Confession

Here's the first installment of 'Seven Deadly Yarns', a forthcoming project--and this blog--inspired by the famous 'seven deadly sins'; these capital vices were first  recorded in the early 4th Century by an ascetic Christian monk, Evagrius Ponticus (though he actually listed eight evil thoughts). In the years that followed others went on to give their own interpretations and, a little over two hundred years later the list had been formalised into the sins that we know today:

• Lust
• Gluttony
• Greed
• Sloth
• Wrath
• Envy
• Pride

I couldn't help but consider this list of sinful situations without wondering, with a smile, how easily these might be applied to fibre-artists of all kinds? 

How easy it is to fall prey to an intense desire for this or that fibre, some latest colour whim. How many of us have an increasing stash of things we just had to have, even if an immediate use or need was not apparent? How many of us have been so eager to show off our latest creation? I'm not saying that these are BAD things, not at all. What I am saying is that these are perfect opportunities to revel in, to explore each and every one of these sins in a soft, snugly, delicious, tactile, sensuous way...

It's my intent to design and make a yarn for each of these heinous sins. I want to make each and every one a celebration of colour and texture, each will be a unique thing. I'll take each one at a time and document my progress and, hopefully, at the end will have seven wonderful new skeins waiting to be put to good use. I already have some ideas ticking away, waiting to be begun when I have materials to hand.

I'm going to be starting at the top of the list and that's what my next post will be about.

An allegorical image, showing the human heart as affected by each of the seven deadly sins here represented each as an animal, so sloth, for example, is shown as a snail.This image was produced by François-Marie Balanant (1862-1930) though his work was most likely a copy of an original by Paul Peyron.