Yarn by Kyoko Mori

Author:Kyoko Mori
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: GemmaMedia
Published: 2010-11-08T05:00:00+00:00

THE WEAVERS’ GROUP I JOINED in Green Bay met every month at a different member’s house. At seven o’clock sharp, we began our business meeting. First, the officers—the president, the treasurer, the secretary, the historian, the social chair—gave their reports, and then we discussed the items on the agenda we’d been mailed. The topics included which books or tapes to purchase for our traveling library, what color our new group T-shirts should be, and what events we should organize for the art fair downtown and the “heritage day” at the history park (a place with restored old buildings and docents dressed in period costumes, some of whom spoke with a fake French or Southern accent). The meeting was followed by a round of show-and-tell and an hour-long educational program about how to eradicate wool moths, how to identify a mystery fabric by burning a small portion of it and examining the ashes, how to design one-piece garments on the loom. At the end, the hostess served coffee, tea, and homemade dessert.

The spinners’ group I’d been attending met at the same community center every month, but people regularly showed up on the wrong night because the fourth Wednesday, our designated meeting night, was not always the last Wednesday of that month. Every time there was an extra Wednesday, the few spinners who went by mistake were surprised to see the bingo players, the League of Women Voters, or the Environmental Action Coalition instead. The spinners’ group didn’t have officers, business meetings, or educational programs. The room was reserved from seven to ten, and people kept arriving and leaving throughout. All we did was sit around with our wheels, spin, gossip, and do a much less organized version of show-and-tell: “show-and-chat endlessly” for some, “show, don’t tell” for others, and for one woman who raised sheep and brought bags of fleece to every meeting, “show-and-sell.” Most of the spinners had several hobbies besides spinning and knitting. While the weavers limited themselves to showing the garments they’d woven or the weaving books they found helpful, the spinners brought handmade objects of all kinds even if they didn’t include hand-spun yarn or any yarn at all. We were supposed to take turns with the snacks, but people forgot which month they’d signed up for. It was okay to bring store-bought cookies or potato chips instead of homemade pies and cakes like the weavers. The community center had a hot pot for making tea and coffee.

The members of both groups were homemakers, nurses, social workers, teachers, librarians, dental hygienists, dairy or sheep farmers, data processors, and secretaries. Every time we met, twenty to thirty women showed up. The youngest were in their thirties like me and the oldest in their seventies. Many had been at the closing-day sale of the only yarn store in town and remembered the double-parked cars and the incredible discounts; they were still knitting and weaving from those bags of yarn. Everyone had children except Sharyl and me. Sharyl, who used to belong to both groups, was in Colorado by the time I joined the weavers.

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