Even cat and dog wool obeys the fingers of blue hair spinners in the field

Aliona Nona is a really colorful personality. At least their yarns or embroidered pictures. And his thoughts are so refreshing, so dust-free, like a little boy with big eyes looking at the world.

And it all started with an ordinary journalistic desire to write about a woman who spins a variety of threads, from dog and cat skins, to bananas, to nettle fiber, who sends thread scraps from all over the world, spins them, and then cards them and spins them again like wool.

Dreamed of an apple orchard

Aliona, who was only thirty years old, changed her life in Vilnius to a village. He left the job he had in the capital, his friends and, as he says, that constant race after money. He chose a farm where he could afford to buy it. She moved in with her one-year-old daughter and her African-American husband. Aliona says that if it weren’t for the man’s desire to live in the countryside, feed on the products he grew, develop a subsistence farm, he might have dreamed of such an opportunity for a long time.

“I dreamed of buying a piece of land and planting apples there. I thought that in five years they would grow up and I could come and be there, ”says the woman. She admits that the tree is something magical to her that attracts her and something that she cannot admire.

Now, sitting on the spinning wheel, weaving, embroidering, she sees them constantly and there was no time to regret having left the noise of the city, the polluted air and people under constant stress and overwhelmed by things and money.

Spinning and embroidery artist

“Who are you?” I ask Aliona and ask her to describe herself, because it is somehow difficult to understand this young creator, no epithet fully adheres to her, does not reveal her existence.

“I am a spinner, an embroiderer. Although I still find it difficult to identify with art, I try to climb up and present myself as an artist because what I do is art. I do not do mass production threads, I do not embroider embroidered works, I add individual things to them, I put hidden clues, many ideas that interest me ”, is Aliona, in her own words.

The thread of as many fibers as possible, as well as the fabrics and embroidery, are the source of Alion’s livelihood. You say you value your products based on the amount of time and hours you put into it.

“I don’t go to restaurants, I don’t know the prices well, but it is common for us to pay much more for dinner than for my work. 100 grams of my yarn does not cost ten euros, and how much time do I dedicate to that work. After all, it is necessary to dye, heat and spin the fiber beforehand. I often recycle the threads that I use in my work myself. And it takes not only time, but also joints. And where are the other jobs: washing, drying, trying to sell, packing the product. Therefore, the money I want to get for my work is an amount that I am not sorry to pay ”, calculates Aliona.

He says that he awards many of his creations: “I’m sorry, because that’s how I express love to people, to my friends.”

After starting to tour, she says that she knows many other artists and sometimes visits stores that sell their works, looks at the prices, and thinks that she too would have the courage and ability to appreciate their work.

Aliona maintains contacts with developers from other countries who care about the same things as her: sustainability, ecology, reducing consumption and waste, minimalism in life.

His works often go abroad. The developer says foreigners have repeatedly paid more because they just got the ridiculous amount she asked for.

“I’m not focused on e-commerce, but on Instagram. That’s where all the sales come from. Most of the buyers are from America, but I have also sent them to Great Britain, Denmark and other countries,” says the developer, who presents his work on various social networks.

The two epochs merged

In the words of Aliona, who learned the craft of spinning, spinning with blue hair is a beautiful anachronism: “After all, the circle is considered a symbol of the ancient era. Few know from which end to access, to many it seems a complicated device that they do not understand. And blue hair is a symbol of modern times. But really, I had blue hair first and only then did the twist occur to me. It arose out of respect for ancient traditions and cultural heritage. “

The young developer says she is the type of person who wants to make everything from scratch, starting with raw materials. Aliona bakes her own bread and makes homemade yogurt. He says he tries to change a lot of dirt-filled things, not to use disposable items, plastic, to cook his own food, not to walk through cafes.

“So touring was just a matter of time for me. I always liked knitting and when I calculated, I realized how expensive I pay for yarn. And especially when I want a more special yarn, let’s say alpaca. As I still could not find threads that I liked and I always wanted a fabric that did not seem to be woven by machine, but more artistic and unique, I discovered that there are threads that I like more. I began to process them, experimenting with several, for many, unknown and invisible fibers, which became a great creative source for me. “

She laughs, being a very poor painter, unable to even make a sketch, and here with the needle and the thread completely different images are born.

Then one day Aliona finally decided to become a spinner: “I hadn’t worked for a while, I didn’t have enough money for a modern spinning wheel, so I applied to the Job Board, which gave young people some money to start a business under employment promotion measures. I told him what I wanted to do and wondered what related sciences he had completed and what he could spin. I say, “No, I can’t, but I will learn.”

And learned. She herself only once visited a neighbor to ask him about certain spinning niceties. Aliona’s independent lessons lasted about eight months: “Then came the moment when I realized that I could bake now, that I could do anything.”

Aliona says there are no schools to teach this trade. And there is no tradition like the old one, when girls from a young age saw their mothers or grandmothers spin and then try them.

She says she realized right away that she couldn’t turn with an old Lithuanian wheel, where the tree rubs against the tree, so she decided to buy a different one, a bearing, in which it turns twenty turns just once. The modern spinning wheel has two facets and is pulled out with both feet, it doesn’t make noise.

So he bought a new spinning wheel made in New Zealand.

From banana to pearl fibers

Aliona likes to talk more about yarn fibers. It can provide about thirty examples of fibers of plant, synthetic and animal origin from around the world. These include bananas, from which the Japanese weave kimonos, and nettles, mint, hemp, flax. Also talk about the aforementioned strands of cat and dog hair, which give the impression of warmth and cozy fluff. Or a fiber made in the laboratory from corn dough, suitable for the production of threads and a recycled plastic bottle turned into threads. There is also the viscose, saturated with various extracts, among which Aliona’s favorite is mint, as well as the pearl fiber: “The pearl fiber is a shell that is ground into a powder and placed in viscose.”

It claims to use only a few synthetics: recycled nylon, glitter, and plastic bottle fiber.

“I also recycle yarns, which are sometimes synthetic,” says the spinner. There are yarn scraps from all over the world. The interviewee laughs that sometimes they offer to send her a ball from the United States: “So I ask her: ‘Do you really want to pay about $ 16 to send me 200 grams of excess yarn?’ Because people who weave have threads that do not fit. Where to put. There are those who keep them, put them in jars or boxes. In the long run, this accumulates a lot of thread scraps. Sometimes they send me completely small balls or fabric samples, which I wrap in the smallest threads, in the finest threads. With the hand warmers, I return that thread to its original state, then mix that fiber with another and thread the new thread. Others do not mix them, but I prefer the tweed effect when the yarn base is one color, and the processed yarns are left with colored balls and then the colored dots are spread throughout the fabric. Thus, thanks to the recycled yarn, it is possible to extract the effect of tweed and various colors. That fabric has a lot of texture, texture and life ”.

Cat and dog hair knitwear

Aliona says that it is possible to spin a single strand of cat and dog hair without additives, but you need to have many of these animals to collect much of their hair.

“I have a friend who has been asking her cat to have her hair spun for several years in a row. She collects about 70 grams a year from two cats. So the result is small, but what an effect. The friends had a yarn shop in Berlin because they wished I could trade my yarn there. The saleswoman couldn’t believe I was wearing a hat knitted from cat hair because it looked like it was made of angrora yarn. Looking at the angora, also known as rabbit wool knitting “You can see that it is furry. Such is the effect of angora wool. Cat hair is very reminiscent of that precious angora fiber. Besides, it is very soft, even that is how cat hair is,” says the creator.

According to Aliona, dog hair is not that soft, but socks are often woven from her tufts of hair, because such coarse hair is believed to promote blood circulation: “For me personally, dog yarn is very pretty, so I often line my landscapes with those threads. My favorite clouds are embroidered with those threads.

I have made all kinds of combinations with dog hair, I have tried different dog skins and I have made sure of the difference. It depends on both the race and the place where the hair was combed from ”.

Roulette says he received an unexpected order this year: a woman asked him to spin her dead dog’s hair.

“She had accumulated about 3-4 kilograms of Chow Chow dog hair and was looking for someone to spin it. The threads were such that probably no one would separate them from being spun from the dog’s hair. They weren’t as arrogant as they seem to be made from stocky hair, they were so long that it looked like I was spinning plain wool. “

The artist does not hide that spinning the hair of a cat or dog makes her job very difficult, since it requires a lot of care and attention. Aliona says it would be so much easier to take traditional wool and spin it, but she doesn’t care. He says he gets calls when he asks if he can’t spin a few kilos of wool, but he can’t.

“I am happy that I don’t have to work anymore and earn money there. We live with minimal costs, we don’t need a lot of money. Therefore, I can afford not to look for an additional source of income, but to do what I like, ”says the artist who spins, sells, weaves and embroiders unique threads.

Aliona does not hide the desire to return to making knitting and embroidery a popular and favorite activity in every home, so that more people get creative and wear their own clothes, to consume less and contaminate an environment where many waste can leave space for all our children.