This is a ball of yarn that I made out of vintage chiffon scarves cut into stripes and braided together. I have carried this ball of yarn with me for over twenty years. Through moves to different states and different houses, I couldn’t bear to leave it behind. I love the lightness of the texture and the softness of the powdery colors. The problem is that it is a very small single ball of yarn. Not much can be made with it.

When I lived in Boston in the late 1990’s there was a vintage/used clothing store call The Garment District. (FYI, it’s still there!) It was a massive 3-story warehouse type of shop with clothes, costumes, and shoes in every corner. There were the clothes by the pound bins. Not unlike Filene’s Basement, (FYI, not there anymore) you dig elbow deep looking for hidden treasures. Despite the bright colors and inviting bits of sequins, this always left me feeling a little itchy and grimy. I wanted to like it. I wanted to be like all the cool kids, art kids, the ones who dressed in vintage clothes, looking carefree, saying fuck you to the establishment. But I couldn’t do it. I hated the search. It seemed like there were so many other ways to spend the time rather than be in a dusty warehouse, filled with used clothes and musty smells. So, instead of searching for clothes that required examining and trying on, I bought multitudes of chiffon scarves for art making.  

Don’t get me wrong, I loved old clothes. When I was 14, I discovered my Grandmother’s basement. It was filled with her old dresses and handbags from decades past. The first dress I adopted was a black shift dress from the 1960s with a white Japanese pagoda printed on the front and back with buttons up the side. I wore that dress until it fell apart, along with a hard-walled burgundy large paisley handbag. I wish I had taken better care of these things so they would have lasted. But old pre-polyester fabric doesn’t last very long when loved by an enthusiastic teenager. The beauty of my Grandmother’s dresses was, not only her great taste and fashion acumen, but I was curvy just like her. I didn’t have to wade through bins of dirty clothes to find the elusive dress made for the busty woman, they were all made to fit me. I still have some of her clothes, 30 plus years later. They don’t fit any more and most are falling apart due to fabric rot, but the love and memories haven’t faded.

When I finally knit this lonely ball of yarn into a swatch the other day, fine threads of the chiffon crumbled off into a pile on my lap. The ball of yarn is ending its life as this blog post.