The first two weeks after Ash Wednesday didn’t really feel like Lent.

I tried to be penitential, but my efforts to induce reflective suffering were repeatedly thwarted. The things we gave up – too much phone, TV for the kids – were a relief to be rid of. Putting them down didn’t feel much like a burden, and that space was filled with joy. I even tried to be more penitential with our food, switching breakfast and lunch to something more boring, and sticking to simple, vegetarian, bean-based meals for dinner. But that intentionality accidentally reactivated my cooking mojo, so we were just eating tasty, fun, filling simple dinners.

All that changed a couple of weeks ago, in the buildup to the Big Work Thing’s Biggest Thing. That’s a sort of retreat called the Alpha weekend, part of the Alpha course.

Bobbins filled last weekend.

A big part of being a priest, functionally, is event planning. If I had known that, I probably would have eschewed ministry life entirely, because me and event planning don’t go together well. I felt inspired and called to lead this Alpha, and that’s been widely encouraged, confirmed, affirmed, and supported, but I knew it would be hard for me. I have a ton of prayer support, and awesome leaders and teams to work with, but sometimes it is hard. Especially in the last week and a half. It came out in my Lenten disciplines – rather, at my total failure to keep them.

Two skeins, 6.3 oz. total, and a baby .6 oz. skein of leftover Polwarth.

One of the hardest things about it, although it was also the best, was that God kept sticking his hand into it. Every single week of Alpha, something major has looked like it was not going to work out. But, at the last minute, it kept working out. Either someone would step in and surprise me, or someone I thought would surely say no would say yes, or someone would decide to be more generous than I had any right to expect. I sent a lot of long emails to my prayer team (and am still sending them, because we have a few weeks left).

God keeps coming through, and in ways that make it clear he is invested in this project. What this is teaching me is that I need to honor him and give him the glory for it. That’s what I asked him to do, after all: make it happen if he wants to use it to glorify himself. Why am I surprised that that’s what he did? I think that’s the main reason he keeps waiting for the last-minute save – I don’t think it’s coincidence, and I don’t think he’s doing it just to mess with my head. I think he’s doing it because it says, in a way we can’t ignore, yo, I’m here! This is my kingdom you’re working on, and I’m gonna build it!

Color mixing. This is going to make amazing tiny subtle stripes.

A key moment for me actually came in association with this yarn I’m showing you. I’ve been using spinning as a way to get my mind off the pressures, to relax and even pray when my brain won’t shut down. I’ve been passionate enough about the spinning that it’s been an effective escape. This yarn in particular was a joy to sample and test and decide exactly what to shoot for. I really enjoyed spinning the singles, as the sampling had helped me refine not only my target yarn, but how to relax into the process of making it.

1 skein is consistently 11 WPI; the other is consistently 12 WPI. Total yardage is 356 yd. in 6.3 oz. Avg. grist between them is 907 YPP.

I was really looking forward to plying this yarn. I love plying; it’s that moment when everything comes together for the first time. It’s the final yarn being born, really, and it’s not a terribly long labor.

When the time came to ply, though, there were only a few days left before the Alpha Weekend. Things were getting sorted, but it took until the day before it started for me to even have confidence that all the pieces would be in place at all. Then there’s always the question of how it will go, and if anyone will show up. I was determined to be present, not to run away from the anxiety, but that meant that spinning was not an effective escape. I enjoyed the plying, but it didn’t delight me. I was distracted. The creation of yarn, though a gift of beauty from a creator God and a good thing, was not going to rescue me. The power of the Holy Spirit and the prayers of my friends carried me through, not my coping mechanisms. This might surprise you, but that actually lets me feel much more free to enjoy my coping mechanisms, because it was finally proven to my subconscious that yarn can’t really compete with the power of real relationships. That’s a bit of obviousness I’ve been struggling to internalize, so I’m glad it happened.

The weekend itself went very well. I won’t go into details, but a great number of prayers were answered, and the guidance myself and others had been receiving from God were confirmed. When the event actually started, I was able to be present and calm.

And best of all, the way God had been making his investment in the project felt – by his annoyingly last-minute semi-miraculous contributions – meant that I was completely confident that he would do exactly what he wanted to do in it. The success of an event like this isn’t in the number of people who show up, but in what the Holy Spirit does inside each person, and that can’t be measured, certainly not by me.

I like dragons. I know they’re usually bad guys, both in the Bible and in Tolkein, but I can’t help it. I used to have a little necklace with a dragon on it, and a necklace with a “dragon tear” glass pendant, and I especially liked to wear it during Lent. They gave me two reminders. First, that the great dragon will, along with all evil in the end, put into submission to the God who is good (see Revelation 12, esp. verse 8). Second, that God is in the business of releasing us from our dragonish-ness, like Eustace in Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and that’s pretty much what Lent is for.

Closeup on the polwarth leftovers. Gorgeous, warm, and much more even than the combo ply, but I’m happy with my choices.

I called the samples “dragon eggs” just for their color, and for how cute the mini-skeins looked curled up into fat little twists. I’m calling the final yarn “Green Dragon,” for that color, for all the Lenten dragon-y reasons above, and for the location of the same name in the Shire, a place of much ordinary enjoyment and frivolity.

It can’t be very comfortable being wool that’s in the process of being made into yarn. It’s shorn off its sheepy home, then scalded, brushed, pulled through small holes, and finally stretched out and twisted under tight tension – usually more than once. But then, a warm soapy bath, and ah! The release! And something new and beautiful is born. That is Lent, and this yarn, and this week.

Thank you for reading. And thank you God.

I’m taking a Blendlings break today, to reflect a little more about the crazy learning experience that has been the last two weeks.

Spinning has been an on-again, off-again thing with me, and generally a solitary thing. I’ve always enjoyed it, but tended to get caught up larger projects that quickly became awful slogs. During my earliest beginnings, I took a spindling class, and had an informal how-to-use-a-wheel session with a Cloverhill coworker who is an excellent spinning teacher, but aside from the few minutes she gave me, I’ve been almost entirely self-taught. Also, since I moved to Ambridge in 2010, my time spent spinning with others has been virtually zero. (The most local guild was an hour away and met at a time that I was obligated to go to chapel for seminary.)

Without that social aspect, I was not motivated to carve out the time for spinning. Knitting made a lot more sense in my life. So I spun, sometimes, but haphazardly, not really knowing what I was doing, and only semi-satisfied with the results. (I even taught spinning a couple of times. Lord save us!)

This particular spinning jag didn’t start with the social side. It started with Deb Menz’ Color in Spinning, though the idea clung on maybe tighter than it would have normally because of the social aspect of my plan of doing daily blogs about it. But as I googled around, with the intention of genuinely improving my skills, I found I was suddenly ready, not just to share my silly experiences, but for the Spinning Social Scene.

See, even when I had a Spinning Social Scene (i.e. in Maryland, pre-Ambridge), I wasn’t ready for how intense it can be. They talked about things like twists per inch and treadling speeds and how many wheels they owned and twenty kinds of draft, and that’s just the stuff I understood. Spinners are Technical Nerds. I just wanted to spin to relax.

Spinning to relax is awesome! There is nothing wrong with spinning with a relaxed attitude toward results. I mean, I always loved the yarn I made, like you love your own child that you pour yourself into, even when you have the kind of morning that has you cleaning out poop from under your fingernails. (Ask me about my Sunday.) No question, I loved my yarn. I just had a limited amount of input into what kind of yarn I was making, which left me with a sense of insecurity and unease about the whole thing. I wasn’t willing or able to invest in improving yet.

I’m ready to be a Spinning Technical Nerd now. Spinning will always be ultimately about relaxing for me, but as I wrote about before, I’m ready to start integrating intention and creativity, right brain and left brain, paying attention and letting go.

Blendlings 1-5, from left to right. You can see how much the yarn changes as I veer around experimenting towards what I want!

My access back into this social scene, and the Technical Nerdery, started in earnest with the Wool N’ Spinning blog by Rachel Smith, which I found while googling around for tips on spinning sweater quantities.

Since I never had a formal class in spinning (at least on a wheel), there’s so much I don’t know. A class would be awesome, but really, just spinning in the same room as a knowledgeable person would tell me so much. Watching a good teaching vlog is like that. For example, just watching Rachel’s awesome video on making samples, in addition to grounding me in that valuable subject, taught me things like:

• Wind on all the way then pull back to get an accurate sample. (Didn’t even know a wheel could do this.)
• Expect your yarn to have lots of twist when you take it off the niddy noddy. (Years of self-doubt for nothing!)
• Change the size of your yarn by changing tension, not by manhandling the fibers. (Oops.)
• Don’t expect to change your treadling speed; change your yarn by changing your tension and ratio and maybe your draft. (MIND BLOWN)
• Twist is about the nature of the fiber itself; ply is about what you want to do with the yarn. (I think?! Must acquire a giant reference work of sheep fibers! or this one!)

Some of these are tidbits; some of these are inklings of huge concepts that will take me years of practice and experiment to understand in a nuanced way, at my own speed. I can see a journey of thoughtful learning that I’ve danced around, not really ready to take plunge, but now it stretches before willing feet, ready to treadle. It’s like the other day when I found a fleece for pennies at the thrift store that fit me perfectly and was almost brand-new: I know I am going to love that thing until it’s shreds, but it’s not shreds yet, and I could see immediately that we have the whole of a wonderful relationship before us.

Check out my wee sample book. I started this before I even encountered Wool N’ Spinning, but the input has been refined. Next time I’ll use index cards, but for this project it’ll be neat to have a record of this whole crazy sampling experiment all in one place.

I connected with Rachel’s style right away, for several reasons. a) She’s super into the technical stuff and the learning process. b) Her taste runs in similar directions as mine, as in, she’s already made lots of yarns and garments that are like the things I want to make or have made. c) She has similar life-limitations that I do – 2 little kids and a demanding part-time job – and is very explicitly intentional about enjoying and prioritizing her family despite her obviously involved relationship with wool and spinning. d) She has a sense of intentionality that resonates with the strategic and purposeful thinking I’ve been leaning into for the last year.

More than that, I think I relate to her wider interactive process. On top of the blog, she started a Ravelry group, and is creating interactive content like color studies and breed studies.* The ability to interact about the things I am learning, with her and with others, is extremely motivating. I relate to that because, in a sense, that’s what my job entails: teaching and connecting with people publicly, in a way that’s open and real but discrete and professional, and in the process inviting them to a wider community and deeper relationship (with God, not spinning, but I think the analogy holds).

*(With the help of her Patreon supporters. I’ve joined at the lowest level, only because I want to make sure this spinning thing is going to stick before I commit to spending a lot, but I had to show a little appreciation for how much I’m learning!)

I’m becoming more and more convinced that pastoring is an art. I don’t mean that it’s intuitive; I mean that the process of doing ministry has a lot in common with the creative process in art and craft as I have experienced it. It takes a lot of trial and error. There are skills to pick up, but you learn by doing, and beautiful things come out of the failures as well as the successes. It’s more about vision than materials, though it’s easy to get caught up in materials since they’re important. The vision is not ultimately about what you made, but about what you are trying to evoke and bring to life in the people who interact with what you made, together and individually.

I know that one reason I’m digging into spinning so intensely right now is that I’m going through this same process at work. As it happens, I have a huge project that’s been building up for six months, and starts today. The difference is, it’s being made possible by the power of the Holy Spirit. Among other things, that is the only reason I’m not a train wreck of a human being. Talk about intention, creativity, and letting go, in the context of community: I do my part, I have lined up all my ducks, but what actually happens is entirely out of my control.

Parenting is like that too. I’m not a teacher, but I would guess teaching, mentoring, management, leadership, share a lot of that resonance. These probably true any time your ultimate goal is about people, rather than things. Connections are what make us and motivate us.

So I’ve had a connection, and that’s reconnecting me with spinning. I’m almost reminded of the heady days when I first discovered The Yarn Harlot, and she set me off spinning and blogging with a passion. I hope the connection is strong enough to make the spinning stick this time. Send up a prayer for me as I do something similar at work.

What about you? Do you find that’s true? What do you love to do now, for fun or work, because someone inspired you personally? Was it an individual, a community, or both? Do you still have those connections?

P.S. I know most of my readership is family, friends, and fellow knitters, but if you’re a spinner reading this, would you give a wave in the comments? I have been very open about the fact that I am learning; if you see I am using the wrong term or doing something dumb, I do welcome your feedback. I probably wouldn’t if you were commenting on, say, my parenting style. But, living three thousand miles from the nearest spinner’s guild, I’m happy to rely on that more charitable corner of the Interwebs that is the Online Spinning Social Scene!

This crazy thing happened to me last week. I was sitting down for a little knitting break while Jared was watching the kids on our day off, and I wanted some light reading while I redid that wonky square on the Mitered Magnificence. Maybe it was the nine colors of mohair on my lap, but I found myself reaching for this.

I skipped the chapter on color theory – I’ve read all that before, I thought – and skipped to a chapter I thought would be tactical for my stash: spinning multi colored yarns from hand-painted roving.

In the next 45 minutes, I had my mind completely blown, did a mental stash dive, and hatched a ridiculous plan for experimenting with and expanding my experience with both spinning and color. More on that another day.

So perhaps it’s not surprising that, Saturday morning, when we had the girls situated for a bit of painting, and Jared was out on an errand, I found myself pulling out their new Crayolas and messing around.

Primaries and secondaries below; tertiaries on top. It helps that Crayola has a solid sample to work with in their 24-pack.

Primary and secondary split complementaries on top; on the right, tertiary complementaries and tertiary split complementaries. Not sure all that verbage is quite right, but it sounds fancy, doesn’t it?

The truth is, without really reflecting on it, I had dismissed color theory as at once too simple and too overwhelming. Too simple because, whenever I tried to read about it, it seemed like I was just reading about the color wheel. I mean, I know what a color wheel looks like; is that really all there is to know? And I had learned the vocabulary of primary, tertiary, split complementary etc. But then I see these color combinations in other people’s designs that I never would have considered in a million years, and I love them. Like the latest post on ravelry about grey and yellow. (Scroll down a titch; it’s from Jan 17th.) I figured I just lacked whatever kind of intuition produces that kind of idea, and trusted there would always be the ideas of others to draw from.

My Saturday morning Crayola epiphany was this: I understand the math of the color wheel. That is not how you learn color theory.

When N had painted a few interpretations of “Twinkle twinkle little star,” consisting in a floral scene with a star and a diamond in the sky, she asked what I was doing. Her response was, “I want to do a color study!”

So, paints cleaned up, and little sister playing with suspicious quietness in the next room, we did color studies together. She would put together some colors that I’d never have thought of, I’d love them, analyze what she did, then put together every possible combination of that color relationship.

The above are her scribbles; I particularly liked the red, pink, and green-yellow combination. I explored the possibilities of that combination below: complementary tertiaries plus one analogous hue.

Then she drew a shape and started filling it with stripes, calling it a “color practice.” So I tried that, drawing a losenge and trying some combinations I’ve e been thinking about for sweaters.

You see, you don’t learn color theory by reading about it. You learn by playing with the actual colors. And of course, when I went back later and started reading Ms. Menz’s chapter on color theory, that’s the first thing she says. I’ve just never been ready to listen.

I have this problem. You can see it in my Crayola experiments.

This is the work of someone who is trying to analyze something.

I get this idea that if I can get the whole big picture in my head, understand the ideas, I can control it. I can figure out what I want, and produce the results I want. Diligence in experimenting is good, but the problem is, when I think like this, I lose the ability to explore. Take risks. Do crazy things and see what happens.

It’s this weird dichotomy in my head between being creative and being intentional. In order to be creative, I relax, but am only willing to put in a limited amount of experimentation and repeated effort. (I almost never re-knit things, for example.) I’m willing to be intentional and work hard, but the only way I know how to do that is by being very controlled and analytical, and then I can’t be creative. I can see that I have to put those things together: apply myself to learning what I don’t understand, as analytically as necessary, and open up to explore and take risks and try unexpected things – at the same time. You know … like you do when you play. At least that explains why my kid is so much better at it than me! That’s being a kid – playing around at things you’re not good at yet.

Sounds like something that would help in the rest of my life and ministry, too. Not just my crafting.

What about you? Do you ever learn about yourself through your crafting? Or, if you have kids, have you been learning about yourself through them lately?