happy accidents
I received an order of goodies from Living Felt a few days ago and there was a little card stuck inside that said “Living is not about being perfect, and it’s not about fitting yourself into a mold, It’s about being happy, being true to yourself & having fun following your own inspired ideas.” It struck me that this captures part of my approach to life right now to a tee. And I thought it was a pretty cool little reminder message to send off into the world in each order to lots of unsuspecting recipients who may need to read that or feel validated by it like I did. And then today a weird spinning wheel thing happened… and I turned it into a ‘happy accident’ a la Bob Ross who was always reminding his audiences that “we don’t make mistakes — we just have happy accidents”. So I thought I’d share my little happy accident.
I was spinning away on a Waste Not Want Not skein - a very freeform spin as I use bits and pieces leftover from other projects to make these. I spin all the scraps onto a bobbin and when I’ve got two bobbinfuls I ply them together for what is always a very neat one of a kind skein of lusciousness with serendipitous color and texture combinations I couldn’t have created if I’d tried. This morning I had a full bobbin on a lazy kate that’s attached to the front of my Schacht Ladybug wheel. I was getting close to filling up the second bobbin and noticed that the wheel was getting difficult to treadle which is odd for this perfect specimen of a spinning wheel. Finally it got even HARDER to treadle and I stopped to investigate. The singles yarn on the bobbin on the lazy kate had somehow gotten caught up in the hub of the big red wheel and was all wrapped around it. A good third of that singles yarn was now on the hub of the wheel instead of on the bobbin. (There’s a photo of this mess in the upper left hand corner of the photo collage for this blog entry.) I tried to just turn the wheel counter clockwise and wind the singles yarn off, but it was far too tangled so I couldn’t and ended up having to cut it off in a zillion little bits. This created a large mound of little bits of merino singles all energized so that it was twisting and plying back on itself in spots. So frustrating to see all that spinning sitting there in shreds. I set it aside for a couple hours while I finished the skein I was working on and then had an AHA!
I carded the hot pink/gold/orange snippets and shreds of merino singles yarn on my drumcarder along with some turquoise romney wool and some natural white merino wool creating a very funky lumpy bumpy art batt. Then I corespun it with a darker turquoise autowrap thread. And VOILA! See it in the picture? (You may have to hit the ‘back’ button to see the photo… I am still figuring out how to blog!) I am in love! My irritating headache of a morning experience became a beautiful happy accident. I think I may do it again on purpose using different colors & fibers sometime.
I’ve just figured out how to enable comments on my blog, so I would love to hear about a recent example from your life or your art where you created a happy accident and allowed imperfection to be an opportunity for you to follow an inspired idea.