Experiments in Joy

by Christina Socorro Yovovich

Late May in 2023 found me gleefully bent over steaming metal pots on my back patio in the early morning. I was scouring my first fleece. I didn’t know what I was doing. I’d started knitting in late January after a thirty-year hiatus. I’d started noodling around with a drop spindle in February. In April a friend had offered to loan me her unused Majacraft Suzie Pro and I’d accepted. Somewhere in there I’d decided to dive all the way down the fiber rabbit hole and process a sheep’s fleece. 

I knew I didn’t know what I was doing. I’d done some reading online. I’d gotten a tetanus shot. But I didn’t have anyone to offer in-person advice, and I knew I could use some. Playing with the scouring pots had everything to do with a promise I had made myself when the year turned. 

I’d told myself 2023 was going to be the Year of Chasing Joy. No worrying about if I was being silly. No worrying about shoulds. No worrying about what other people thought of me. I was going to pursue joy in the form of creative play by following my heart. And from the moment I felt the wool moving through my fingers as I re-learned how to knit, that joy largely came in the form of fiber arts. 

It took some work to find that local Shetland fleece. Lots of searching online and sending out emails. But eventually I found a local shepherd willing to sell me this wonder. I bought it from her at a fiber festival, brought it home, unrolled it on my back patio, and tried to guess which parts of it had belonged to which bits of the sheep. I separated it into a few bundles and set two of them to soak in my large, covered metal scouring pots overnight. 

The next morning, as the sun rose, I set myself to scouring. I hauled hot water from the kitchen sink out to the patio. I added what I hoped was the right amount of Unicorn Power Scour. I felt like a sailor trying to navigate by the stars after reading a couple pages on the internet. Would I felt the wool? Would I get it clean enough? Would I manage to comb it after it dried? What the heck was I doing?! 

It was glorious. I giggled to myself all that morning. It had hit me sometime that spring, at age forty-nine – when was the last time I’d done something I didn’t know how to do? I learned, as I struggled first with the spindle and then with the borrowed wheel, that I dearly loved doing things I didn’t know how to do. Especially things that were low stakes in the moment. Nobody but me cared if I produced usable yarn. It was play. Experimentation. I was trying things to see what would happen. 

What happened the morning I scoured wool is that eventually I carefully laid some of the wet wool over a screen on a drying rack and I left it, confident the New Mexico sun would do its job quickly. In the afternoon, I checked on it. It was dry! Sort of fluffy! Definitely not felted. And… as I looked closely, I saw something. Thousands of somethings, or at least hundreds. Somethings out of a replica of the movie Aliens. I saw what must be tiny eggs nestled in the fiber, and out of many of them were the heads of little white grubs, bursting forth. They weren’t moving. Probably some, or several, parts of the scouring process had killed them. But what about the tiny eggs without emerging grubs? What, exactly, was I supposed to do? 

I went to the internet and asked a spinning chat group for guidance. The response was unanimous: Do NOT take that wool into the house. Bin it. Or use it as mulch in the yard. Do not even try to spin it. I looked again at my horror show of a scoured fleece. All that work and time and even a tetanus shot. All those pots of water hauled outside. 

All that fun. I started to laugh. All this work for wool full of grubs, and it was hilarious. When was the last time I’d worked so long for something so disastrous? And when was the last time I’d felt so much glee in the space of a season? In one sense, my great scouring experiment had failed. But in another, it was part of a long series of things that were giving me life. 

I’ve scoured wool more successfully since  – though not large amounts, because my bad knees make hauling all that water tricky. I’ve kept on learning more about knitting and spinning. I have a beautiful Schacht-Reeves now that lives in the house with what is now my Majacraft. Always, I experiment. To become a better fiber artist is one reason. But more than that, to become a more joyful human. 

I live with bipolar and PTSD and in much of my adulthood, joy was difficult for me to access. That isn’t a problem anymore. I have my joy every day, reliable as the sun. But also, as tricksy as the wind. If I feel myself becoming too sure of myself, I experiment. Try a new thing. Recently, I took a nålbinding workshop. Now I’m learning to weave on an inkle loom. I’ve started sketching daily with fountain pens. I’m not necessarily good at all these things, definitely not at first. But the play is in the experimenting and the joy lives there too. 

It’s 2026 now and I no longer need to label this the Year of Chasing Joy. I could label my life that way, maybe. I have a life of chasing joy. That doesn’t mean I don’t face the hard things. I’ve been doing trauma work this past year that goes beyond anything I once thought myself capable of. But beside the hard stuff is play, experiments, joy. It has been years since I was listless and bored. Perhaps that chorus of grubs bursting forth were a reminder to celebrate my path – the ugly, the ridiculous, and the joyous all bundled together. 

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