Throughout most of human history all around the world, women spent their lives spinning, because it took huge amounts of time to make enough yarn to make anything. So if you take, for example, the cotton yarn that it takes to weave the denim for a pair of jeans, that's about 6 miles of cotton thread.
Mindfulness is this. It's an interesting thing because simultaneously a really boring sounding word, a very anodyne sounding word, but also the recipient of an incalculable amount of hype. So everything's mindful-- yarn bombing, mindful this, mindful that. And I often think that people, when they talk about mindfulness, really have no idea what they're talking about.
And so here are the figures posed. Took a bunch of yarn , painted them green to create all those hanging vines.
up a huge fuss in order to retain their role as pilots. Is that really a realistic account of how that worked and that happened in your experience or is this just Tom Wolf ripping a good yarn ? Worden: Well, I think Tom got it mostly right. He's a great writer. And I spent a lot of time with him when he wrote that book. There's always a problem, a difference of opinion about how you do things. How much automation do put into something? How much manual control do you put into something? How do the two integrate together? How do
This is turning on the coffeemaker. This is helping untangle the yarn . This is leaving a sticky note on their computer that says I love you.
What napkin you gave to me. With that cotton you can make yarn and cloth.
And here, you've got practically no boundary at all. And so she worked with yarn , unbleached, knit it together into traditional patterns that always had a massive infinite
So that was the core ingredient of that story. It was just a great yarn .
They could read a baseball. They could read the pattern that the yarn made. They could read the pitcher's motion.
Cut. I know, I know. They're either given twelve pieces of yarn or six pieces of yarn , and given one week to make a scarf.
and they do it in the middle of the most interesting time in the history of you know of global Finance uh pretty easy to kind of rip through that yarn and forget for a minute that there are some underlying principles to the story that might be useful to other people so I kind of felt like my job here was to make sure that those those principles got called out and and um uh were were
So before the Industrial Revolution, thread was very scarce. That was the bottleneck the bottleneck was getting enough yarn to make the fabric. Weaving or knitting was not the bottleneck.
From the stage one, like rocket, removing the first set of booster, you need domain knowledge. So that's what I'm having cotton yarn knowledge. The object I took from the packet, a pad, my mind is saying, 10 gram weight per pad.
And just by rolling things up, you can figure out what colors work well against each other when you're putting them together. And the same thing you can do with yarn . And you can do it with paint.
And I had bought maybe a few Merino sheep and some cashmere goats, because I thought spinning would be really fun. You know, making yarn . I said, I think that we can impact the land and do a better job economically for us as a family if I go to a smaller animal.
Cut. I know, I know. Why does that work and why does the 12 pieces of yarn not work?
Yeah, and it wasn't fair. I mean, that was her ball of yarn . She should have been the one doing that, right?
So they ensure that the rugs, which are long-lasting products, are of such high quality that customers are able to enjoy that for several decades. So they used very high quality bamboo, yarn , silk, et cetera. And priced their products in a premium way, so that you get high quality branded products.
And then I got a master's in it. And for 16 years I worked as a creative director at a yarn company. And then I had my daughter, who's here, and I decided to go freelance.
Cut. I know, I know. Here's what the scarves look like when they have 12 pieces of yarn .
Cut. I know, I know. Here's what the scarves look like when they had six pieces of yarn .
But now the whole globe, through internet commerce, is a large market. But it has a side effect of it allows you to knit with these yarns , because it used to be-- you know how the blue can rub off
Everything was scarce. Food was scarce. And it's only with the Industrial Revolution, which made thread or yarn for making cloth available widely, and then later power looms and then chemical dyes and all these things that made cloth abundant, that cloth becomes
to make enough yarn to make anything. So if you take, for example, the cotton yarn that it takes to weave the denim for a pair of jeans, that's about 6 miles of cotton thread. And before the Industrial Revolution, Indian spinners using the charka, who were the best and fastest in the world at spinning cotton,
on a body and seeing how they would drape on a woman's body. on the floor, and they get re-woven and spun into a new yarn .
And he was telling us that his wife Amy is a big knitter. And so inspired by the book, he went and untangled this ball of yarn that had been vexing Amy. And we just love this example, where it's so generous, so thoughtful, and so tailored
So I did blue with brown on top, printed them, and they actually just use latex paint. It's a great way to get rid of things, old bits of yarn and everything.
Last story, I talked with Sarah Young in Portland Oregon who opened a yarn shop at the height of the recession.
I quit in December 2012, and now I do kids books. And the most recent series of books that I've done is called "Star Wars Epic Yarns ." where we-- we being my brother and I, my brother Jack-- we abridge each of the original "Star Wars" movies into word primers that are just 12 words and 12 images.
So through my eyes, an arcane and sort of weird career, and hopefully entertaining and a good yarn .
about -- suggests that the temping machine that forms the power face of the carpet in the first place as untapped potential to precisely put tufts of yarn on selected colors that