Venomous & Beautiful

I'm talking about the inspiration for my new supercoil art yarn: the Portuguese Man o' War, also known as Bluebottle or blue bubble. The binomial name is Physalia physalis and the jelly-like creature is, in fact, not one, but many - a colony of polyps and medusoids. I've never seen a real one (they're not native where I live or where I usually go on vacation), but I am fascinated by the beauty and the stunning colours of these creatures. I vaguely remember reading about them as a child, in some kind of children's book about what kind of things you can find on the beach, and I always thought they were definetly deadly. Now, years later, there's the internet ;-) and I found out that though they are venomous they rarely cause death, but the stings are very painful. So - I still don't really fancy meeting one of these beauties directly ;-)

Anyway, I've been wanting to spin a yarn to do their beauty justice and I've given it a lot of thought. Somehow, a simple yarn didn't seem fitting, so I decided to go for supercoils once more, which I haven't done for quite some time. I think it was the best choice, I am very pleased with the outcome. I realised that I tend to forget how much work this technique is, this skein of 30 m/60 g took me three and a half hours. But it was worth every minute, the yarn is spectacular! I really love the colours (though I could never wear them, they don't really look good on me) and their distribution. And I sooo like the texture of supercoil yarn! :-)