Yesterday, coming home from the gym, I stopped at the grocery store to pick up dinner ingredients -- Thai chicken, green beans, bamboo shoots for me, a bunch of meat and cheese for Kevin, who's trying some low-carb nonsense. (Okay, maybe the diet itself isn't nonsense, but giving up bread for the rest of your life? Sheer nonsense.) I couldn't resist some of the spring flowers they had -- daffodils, tulips, hyacinths. I brought them home, set them up, repotted the ones I had pots for. And this morning, I woke to to the most amazing scent -- the hyacinth (the blue ones in front) scent is just filling my front room and kitchen. It may be snowing outdoors, but it's spring in here. It helps.I especially appreciated it because I had trouble getting to sleep last night, and am a little groggy today. My brain kept going, mostly with art projects for WisCon. I have these panels I've covered in sari fabric; I'm trying to figure out how I might attach them together (with thin gold chains, I think), and then what I would put on them, and how -- perhaps just a series of poems, printed neatly on nice paper? Not sure. It's harder matching the luxuriousness of the sari fabric to other materials, especially that incorporate text. Harder than when I was mostly working with dried flowers, handmade papers, that sort of style. But an intriguing challenge.
And speaking of sari fabrics, I finished a scarf last night. I found the yarn at a place called Art Fibers in San Francisco; it's the one they call Sanskrit. It's made of reclaimed sari fabric -- as the sari is woven on the loom, the right and left edges have to be cut off. They take those remnants and send them to Nepal, where skillful Nepalese women take them apart and remake them (I have no idea how) into delightful, shimmery yarn. I spent a few hours crocheting, in front of the tv, and voila -- a scarf! Much fun. I'm going to do some more. I'm rather in love with this one at the moment, but if I get less attached, I'll be selling it at WisCon. The yarn is quite expensive, so it'll be a pricey piece -- at least $50 or $60, I think. I'm thinking I may borrow a page from Elise's jewelry and see if I can come up with a title, and perhaps a little poem or story that could go with the scarf. Something unique, inspired by the gorgeous threads. Help make it a little more into art, rather than craft. I'm told you can charge more for art. :-)
