Water Droplets

I spend 30-40 minutes every morning walking around one or both of the water features near my home. There are a set of ski lakes (which I call “the forbidden lakes” since they are fenced in and have signs against trespassing because they’re only for the original wealthy neighbors here—except for once a year when they open for a triathlon). There is also the “Jensen Nature Park” a little further away, where ducks and heron and storks and other wild fowl live, and where I occasionally go to paddleboard.

I find water enormously soothing. My youngest daughter, as soon as she could crawl, would crawl right into any nearby body of water. It freaked me out, so I got her into swim lessons as soon as I could (at age one) and then got to watch as lifeguards freaked out when this tiny eighteen-month-old would go up on the diving board, jump in, pop up, and dog paddle to the ladder. When I told my mom about this kid and how terrifying she was, my mom insisted to me that I was exactly the same at that age, that she was always scared I was going to drown in the pool that was right next to our house. Apparently, genetics are strong. Also, when your mother curses you that you will have a child exactly like yourself, that curse usually works.

I come to triathlon from swimming, which is fairly unusual. The swim is the easy, lazy part of the course. I warm up during the swim. It’s the bike and run that are hard. For most people, it’s the reverse and the swim is the terrifying part of the course and once they’re out of the water, they feel confident again. I used water to birth my children when I could. I take a bath every morning I possibly can and am often resentful if I have to time myself to get to the train and can only spend three minutes, so I have to shower instead of my bath. My realtor found out quickly that a master bath without a soaker bathtub in it was not going to be a home I was interested in purchasing.

Some mornings, I watch as the water fowl dip into the water and it creates circles that spread out over the water, stopping only when they hit other circles. I am mesmerized by this beautiful, natural art. I’ve tried to take photographs of it, but I’m unable to capture whatever it is that I love about it. So I conceived the idea of creating a piece of yarn art that would show how I see water droplets expanding and hitting other circles of motion.

Originally, the idea was to be a flat piece. The whole process took over a year. As sometimes happens with my most original pieces, I gave up several times. I put all the circle aside, considering undoing them and making something else with the yarn. But perhaps it’s just as well that they were so tightly crocheted in those little circles that I couldn’t separate the yarn. I tried. So the circle sat until I finally decided that what needed to happen was that some of them needed to be significantly larger. The larger a circle gets, the more time it takes to do a single round. The largest of these circles took a full hour to add just one more round to. I timed it because I was frustrated.

Finally, I started laying out the circles. At first, I kept imagining the flat display, with the circles laid out, not overlapping. But it just didn’t feel special or artistic at all. So when I started putting the circles on top of each other and saw how that looked, I got more excited. It felt more organic, the way I saw natural circles in the water stopping each other depending on which one had more energy. Then, I pieced them all together, without any of the backing I’d thought I would need. I told myself that I’d add that in later.

Well, later came, because the circles were too floppy and fragile (I thought). As I tried to fill in the negative space with yarn that I wanted to both match and yet not be the same as the yarn in the circles, I found myself picking out various greens and blues to do the job. From there, it was intuitive. And frustrating. Because I had to crochet in each section completely individually. There was no pattern for this. It was all made to order, and I was constantly undoing and then redoing, making pieces thinner or wider or longer or shorter so that the circles would lie properly next to each other.

When I saw the pieces together at last, I thought briefly I was finished. But overnight, I realized I needed to have some kind of border. That was when it turned into the weird amoeba-like thing that it currently is. The border just grew into something unruly, not at all flat. I was frustrated with it as I tried to lay it out by my desk during work hours. I took it outside to try to block it, but it still wasn’t flat. A friend suggested briefly that maybe this was a piece that was meant to be in a corner or even a ceiling. I have a horrible phobia of ladders so I didn’t dare to try to put it up too high, but after taking down some photos, I found this spot for it in the corner going up the stairs in the entryway to my house.

I absolutely love it there. It is a weird piece of art that no one else could have created, that I almost didn’t create because I wasn’t letting it tell me what it wanted to be, but was trying to impose my will on it. Yarn has its own will, I’ve learned

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