In the midst of the holiday craze, rushing to get houses cleaned, extra food prepared and frozen for company, christmas shopping, and creating scarves and yarns and other stuff for holiday gift giving and (of course) sale over at my web site, Handmade, a really bright spot in my not-so-great-craft-fair weekend: Somebody bought my yarn purely to look at! This, I think is the ultimate compliment to an artist. Now I feel that the journey to transform my caterpillar-crafty self to a butterfly-artist is really beginning to move along.

Up until now, I really thought of myself as a craftswoman...but the artist in me is trying to emerge from my crafty exterior while I surround myself with fiber. As a medium, it is fast enough for my attention-deficit-crafting-disorder; in other words, I can make something from start to finish in a few hours so there's no guilt about UFO's (unfinished objects, for the uninitated craftaholics out there) cluttering up the house. But it's more about this imperceptible quality to fiber. There are so many things that raw fiber can become, and we just have to wait for the muse to draw it out of us, and then we'll decide what each fleece/dyepot/batt/roving/yarn is yearning to be.

Anyhow...all that aside as a much larger discussion for another day--this weekend, on Sunday at a craft fair, a woman bought my yarn purely to look at. She was allergic to lanolin/wool and told me so as she admired Jen and my scarves and creations. Then she came back and bought Feltalicious:

When I asked her what she wanted with yarn since she couldn't touch it, she told me she had a place to put it just for decorating. She thought it was beautiful and just wanted to look at it....my yarn....wow. There is no greater compliment. Hence my transofmation from caterpillar to butterfly is in motion. I'm in my coccoon and spinning away, trying to transform from hobbiest/craftswoman to artist. It's harder than it sounds, but I think I will get there, if I live long enough.

At camp pluckyfluff east, one of the questions Mike (our documentarian--is that a word?) asked: "Is your yarn a finished object?" And in my non-so-clear way, I tried to explain that I thought yarn is art. It is finished whan I decide it's finished. It doesn't need to be anything else, ever. It is just as useful as an object of art as it is when another artist transforms it into a hat or scarf or sweater. Honestly, yarn is the ultimate art, as it's both beautiful and functional. As a gardener, that's my focus. As someone who admires well made homes, and textiles, and furniture, that's my focus. As someone who drools over beautiful and tasty food and kitchen tools and pots and pans, that's my focus.

Form plus function. Indeed...