Kusha Kusha Progress

I'm in the home stretch of the Kusha Kusha scarf, a project that is so aesthetically pleasing to me on so many process levels that I don't so much want to be finished knitting it. 

But wait, when the knitting is finished, it must be fulled/felted and that's a whole other delight, one that involves transformation, serendipity....ahhh, a total bliss project.

Never mind that the knitting is like knitting with hair, that with this fine a yarn and the needle size, it's difficult to discern just which side of the stockinette is knit and which purl. That at least once I picked it up and got it wrong and so have a section of reverse stockinette. Yes, never mind - felting heals such things.  And if not, it's really okay. The personality of this scarf is so plastic and whimsical and  unconventional it can handle it, act like a bit of reverse stockinette was intended from the beginning.

On a serious note, even before the earthquake and tsunami, I had been thinking a lot about Japan lately, about how much there is the Japanese influence on my fiber art. Perhaps not so much in design, but in the materials I work with - my favorite yarns,  SAORI weaving, the concept of wabi-sabi I often ponder. 

So as I began the Kusha Kusha with Habu Textiles yarn, and am in the beginning my SAORI journey, and am making textile jewelry with Noro yarns, my thoughts have been of gratitude that these things have come into my life, how much deep joy I have in working with the textures and colors, the freeing process of SAORI.  Gratitude to the Japanese artists who have created them.  Those have been my thoughts for awhile, and so I feel connected in a more personal way to the deep sadness over the terrible, incomprehensible devastation that has come to Japan.

May healing begin.