flower thread jumble-brain

Sometimes the beauty of the materials I work with supersedes the beauty of what I make from them. I diminish them by narrowing their vast potential into an object. I feel this especially about yarn and embroidery floss. And poetry; what lines can equal the glorious potential of the alphabets and sounds? Adeena Karasick refers to letters of the alphabet as "wriggly insignias." What could be a better representation of wriggly insignias than these twirling curly ringletty whorls of skeins?

The floss I use for cross-stitching is Danish Flower Thread. Flower thread is the generic name for non-glossy cotton embroidery thread; Danish Flower Thread (Dansk Blomstergarn) is the official thread used by the Danish Handcraft Guild (Håndarbejdet's Fremme). When I come across it in the US I used to buy out the store's supply because I considered it such a rarity, but now that I live in Minneapolis, a city that fetishizes its Scandinavian immigrant heritage, I've got a steady source at Ingebretsen's Scandinavian Gifts. In fact, I can't possibly in my lifetime use up the flower thread I've already got.

This need for over-abundance suggests also the addict's itch for color, materials, textures, the desire to bury my fingers in skeins and loops and exultations of spun and spinnable yarn-thread-stuff, to revel in it immersively forever without any pretense toward mastery.

This photo only begins to suggest the squirmy, wormy, brainlike lump of vibrant life of embroidery materials.