Air Ecru’s intrepid pilot and tour guide, Noelle, this month takes us on a voyage that begins underground and ends underwater.  Buckle up!

At Artfibers we start each week with design.  The subject at hand was Brioche, a complex thick/thin stretch yarn requiring double dyeing in opposite chemistries. Noelle had visited an Egyptian antiquities exhibit over the weekend and still had visions of mummy masks filling her head.  “This yarn wants to be Egyptian”, she said with great conviction, “and I know how to do it.”  The pyramids were designed by a young person with similar intensity, so we offered support and hoped for the best.  It was!

As we knit with the new Brioche, it began to look less and less like tombware, more and more like — a productive beehive.  Noelle quickly made a skirt, a simple tube invested with the rich energy of golden pollen. Rox, who loves honey as much as any Pooh, caught the travel bug too and waved her magic wands.  Presto!  This month’s featured project, the Sash Bag in gold Brioche, made the perfect slim container for adventuring (see below, free pattern here).  All those buzzing wings put us in the mood to take flight ourselves, so Noelle offered to fire up the jets on Air Ecru #1 and take us to the ‘land of Nile’.  We arrived in — no time!

While in Egypt we learned that the story of the Golden Fleece was first published there, in Alexandria, when it was a Greek city.  Jason and the Argonauts were knitters as it so happens, and set out searching for magical golden fleece from which to make extraordinary boat neck shirts, warm when wet and reflective for safety.  First they sailed down the Red Sea to Ethiopia, where they found beguiling young women knitting a fantastic wool/silk yarn called Rasu, with little flecks of gold embedded in a rich chocolate brown.  It was lovely and knit like a dream, but their adventure had just begun.

A sudden gale blew them far off course.  Through dense fog they heard the menacing din of Sirens. Being great navigators this bloodcurdling sound instantly told them that they were in — New York!  While there of course you have to take in a show, which they did at the Metropolitan Museum. In the costume exhibit they were captivated by a garment made in soft golden tussah silk, called Tantra, harvested wild in the branches of oak trees.  The tunic touched their hearts — after all it looked so ‘Greek’.  Using oars for needles and munching on their mathematical invention called pi for quick energy, they were able to make tunics for the entire crew in one shot from overlapping cast-ons.  Crafty eyes in the big apple reverse-engineered this amazing feat and used its inspiration to create other modalities for manipulating gold.  This is how derivatives and credit default swaps were invented, so we have been told.

The tunics made them homesick so they flew back to the Med. The best connection was through Venice where, as luck would have it, they found themselves in the middle of Carnaval, the mysterious festival of masks.  Worried about pickpockets in the crowds, since their tunics were open at the sides and had no pockets, they chose to stay together.  This was easy because they all knit masks from a yarn that looked like Murano glass beads mounted on gold thread from Byzantium, a rare treasure called Scarab.  The masks were a big hit and so many people asked them to dance that they fell into an exhausted stupor (jet lag and partying — they should have known better).

While asleep they were visited by an angel who explained the real story of golden fleece.  Long ago peasants discovered a sheep in a stream, drowned by a flash flood.  The flood also washed sediment down from the mountains, including flakes of gold that stuck to the lanolin in the sheep’s wool.  So the peasants hung the fleece from the sheep in a tree to dry.  This was along the ancient silk route, east of the Black Sea, where people from many lands passed.  Soon the word was out, “There’s gold in that thar — fleece!”  Jason’s lads set out Eastward, but in fact the trees had long since been cut down (ironically, by Greeks building boats).  Luckily they bumped into Marco Polo, who knew that what they were looking for was abundant in China, where he took them.  They were delighted by what they found — golden bamboo, spun into a a dazzling yarn called Bambusa, wrapped in the very tussah silk that they had worn through their journey.

It had been a long trip and they desperately needed baths, so the Argonauts, being very shy, quickly knit up swim trunks from Bambusa and joyously plunged into the ocean.  There underwater, among shipwrecks and old shopping carts, they made the most amazing discovery of all.   Noodling around on the sea bottom, as Argonauts will, they found giant golden shells from which grew an amazing golden fiber called byssus, the rarest and most precious of all fibers, marine silk.  They scooped it up and hung it in trees to dry, but you know what, this is why our story has a sad ending.  Hanging a sheepskin in a tree might have been ok, but hanging shellfish up created — what shall we say — a mighty reek.  It was on that reek that their ship of adventure foundered, still short of gold after all their trouble, which is why the Greek government needs a bailout today.  So we have been told.

At least they were able to find a yarn that looked like byssus, which is called Ming, from which they knit wings to fly home on Air Icarus.  It was a long trip which made their arms very tired, but they accumulated a lot of frequent knitter miles.  Noelle dipped our wings in salute as we passed them on Air Ecru.  We found our gold, not the kind that you see advertised on late night television, this is the real treasure.  Beautiful golden fibers — Brioche, Rasu, Tantra, Scarab, Bambusa, Ming — all on the June sampler from Artfibers, and you don’t have to flap your arms to enjoy them (well not very much).  We started with honeybees and after all this must declare that our epic voyage was indeed sweet.  It’s been quite a yarn, hasn’t it!

Ordering Samplers and Kits

The sampler includes 15 yards of six yarns, 90 yards in all, for just $10 ppd US ($15 international).  To order  send an email to artfibersyarn@earthlink.net (or yarn@artfibers.com) including your mailing address –we’ll bill you. Billing is normally through Paypal, where you can pay by credit card without having a Paypal account.  We also accept checks.

If you’d like to subscribe to the Yarntasting Cafe samplers, let us know that in your email and we’ll put you on the list.  We can set the subscription up so that you can decline any sampler at the billing stage, or alternately, just ship you the sampler automatically every month.  Please let us know which option you prefer.

A kit for the Sash Bag in Brioche is $40.00 ( plus postage and sales tax if you are in California).  Free pattern here.  Kit price includes yarn, pattern and button or bead closure.

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We develop many new colors each month, sometimes in new yarns.  This month we are introducing Rasu, a silk/merino yarn with natural stretch.  We’ll leave you with another new Rasu color (not on the sampler card), based on an image of Stonehenge, a prehistoric calculator made to observe the flow of the seasons.  As the solstice approaches, we are graced by an abundance of golden light.  We liked this image because it demonstrates that, with all the tons of stone, the most important part of Stonehenge is the light that envelops it, the same gift of light that we each enjoy every day.  That is our journey.  Bon voyage!

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For a pilot’s-eye view on this adventure, please visit Noelle’s new blog – Colorful Revelations.  And if you like her work, please leave a comment!

Tags: artfibers, sampler, yarntasting cafe

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