Imperfect Beauty

One of the things I discovered on my 2 weeks of self exploration before the bomb dropped is that I have to find beauty in all things.  It's amazing that 2 weeks AFTER the bomb dropped I'm able to start seeing the beauty again.  I honestly worried there for a little while that my ability to see beauty in the world had been stripped away from me.

Today I feel somewhat healthier in mind.  I have not only survived the past 2 weeks, but I have been able to enjoy a few moments of it, I have found a pathway to making myself emotionally healthy (that won't be easy but I can do it), I've had 2 job interviews, another today and another promised at some point this week.

I have faith that things will work out someway.  I don't know what that way is, but I have plans if my dream plans don't work out and so I can settle the awful nervous feeling in my stomach and begin my path to independence.

The project that I've been working on this week is my crochet afghan.  I made the Groovyghan out of all the Noro Silk Garden Sock Yarn that I had in my stash.  I realized after attempting to start a sock with it that it is simply too thick to make a sock that I would wear, and the fact that it's so loosely spun and so "thick/thin" I realized that it would be a "wear around the house" sock...and to be honest we just don't have that much need for a wear around the house sock in Mississippi.  But I love cuddling with blankets and who cares about gauge in blankets.  It can go back and forth and still be gorgeous and cuddly...so Groovyghan was born.

That said, I had a LOT of yarn leftover from all those skeins (I have a little bit of obsession for Noro yarn, more on that in a minute) so realized I could make another blanket, so I started going through the 250+ blanket squares crochet book that I bought and made one of each square I came to until I ran out of yarn. I have 36 squares and will be putting them together in a 6x6 grid.  Here's what I have so far:

I'm doing a half double crochet edge on each square then joining them with a single crochet join (that faces to the back).  I haven't yet decided what the border will look like...I'll get there when I'm finished joining all the squares and get a sense of what the blanket will need. I'm using a Noro Silk Garden Sock Yarn in neutrals for the border and joining strips.

SO...the title of this entry:  Imperfect Beauty.  Noro is one fine example of an imperfect beauty.  Perfect yarn is spun so that it is a consistent size throughout the entire skein.  Every single skein of Noro yarn that I've ever worked with goes from very thin to (depending on the overall thickness of it) very thick.  It has puffy spots and really thin spots, and the process of spinning the yarn apparently leads to breaks because there are frequently knots tying the yarn together.

Noro also changes color--all of that color work in those squares (except for a very few occasions where I used 2 balls) is the simple color change within one ball of yarn.  The gradations of color are lovely as you follow along--it'll be all blue, then flecks of pink will start coming in and then it'll be half and half and then it'll be pink with flecks of blue and then all blue.  It's gorgeous how the color changes happen...but sometimes those knots I mentioned?  They'll just simply knot the yarn when it's time to do so to make the skein and sometimes rather than getting a gradual change in color you'll have a knot and it'll go from tan to neon green.

The beauty in Noro for me is the unpredictability of it.  You don't know exactly what you'll get but you just trust the yarn to do what you're asking it to and in the end you step back and you have something gorgeous and people are always amazed at the results.

It's like life, really, when you think about it.  Nature or whatever you want to look at.  But humans especially are not perfect.  Ever.  We have flaws outwardly and inwardly.  We make mistakes and sometimes they're big ones.  Sometimes our "color changes" are abruptly interupted and we have a knot tying the two paths of our lives together and there wasn't much of an intention of matching colors when that knot was made.

That's where I think I am...I've tied my turquoise yarn to my new red yarn and I'm about to take off on whatever this new adventure looks like.  Sure it's an abrupt change and sure it's going to be obvious when one looks at the details of my life this very minute.  But years from now when we've all gained a little perspective we'll say "see...we saw that coming all along...that area where things got kind of thin...the spinning machine was moving faster than you could handle, so you then dumped more fiber in and that's why it got all thick and puffy but you overwhelmed the system and it stopped...and you got red yarn as a result.  And look what beauty you made out of it."

That's honestly where I think I am today.  I, too, am an imperfect beauty.