Well, having one’s neighbors, who have been granted legal residency, snatched off the streets of New York by masked men in body armor, and disappeared to Louisiana … and then, praise be to the Goddess and the ACLU, the poor woman is not disappeared, and the nation’s not lost yet …  it is all very distracting.

Furthermore, the Kumihimo class didn’t go all that well, but does anybody want to hear about two days of teary-eyed frustration?  Am I going to tell anybody how much I spent on an oceanside resort room that smelled so strongly of mildew I slept in the car?  Of course, sleeping in the car was no hardship, but the sum spent was humiliating.

First of all, there was my ever-recurring bad luck.  We worked with actual silk.  I never have: one, because the stuff is very expensive, and two, it is prone to snag and tangle.  If you are self-teaching, you can wind up with an expensive and unusable snarl.

But we watch the teacher demonstrate silk warp handling: shaking out three yards of a couple hundred aligned, very fine, silk threads the length of the room.  This gets carefully divided into tiny hanks of about twenty-some threads each.  The twenty fine silk threads make up one braiding cord; each of those bundles of twenty are smoothed and stretched, and wound onto bobbins.  Laid over the Marudai the threads look like a smooth single silk ribbon.  What could go wrong?

And the thing is, mostly, for everyone else, it went fine.  Commercially prepared silk warp bundles are combed and bundled to behave themselves quietly.  You do have to pay attention, but they can be shaken out and sorted onto bobbins with minimal fuss.

Alas, there was an issue with the orange.  There was only one bundle of orange, and it was so pretty, and I was so pleased to get my greedy hands on it.  In time, my theory was that dye residue was causing the threads to catch on each other.  Teacher believed that the bundle had simply not been properly combed.  I really wanted to give up on the orange, but teacher was determined.  He spent most of the morning sorting out my orange hank, which made me anxious and conspicuous, and I spent two days winding and rewinding snarly bobbins.

Then, badly combed orange silk entirely aside, I think I was depressed … not moody but clinical.  Braiding requires the ability to concentrate, focus and follow a fairly complex sequence of moves, and I simply could not do it.  For every twenty passes, I’d have to unbraid eight, cause I lost my mental place.  Two days of that is altogether misery-making. On top of which, the orange and pale green looked kinda puky together. Color theory is not my strength.

And then, to finish off the experience, I had had an inkling from the start that I really wasn’t up to it, that all that money would have been better spent if I’d just blown off the class and spent the two days gossiping in the gallery, and sitting on the beach stitching hexagons.  I gave it serious thought, but no, “you have to do what you came to do” and someday I’m going to learn to cut myself some slack.