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.

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.