Every colorway here starts with a reference. Usually it is a memory, a time of day, a mineral. The Reaping started with an image I could not put down: a field of standing grain, and the sickle.
We have made the harvest into a soft thing, without the depths that older fairytales used to bring to it. Cornucopias, wheat sheaves tied with raffia, the word bounty on a sign in a kitchen. That is not what the first harvest was. Lughnasadh is the festival of the god Lugh, the long-armed, master of all skills, and he founded it as a funeral feast for his foster mother Tailtiu, who died of exhaustion after clearing the forests of Ireland for planting. The festival begins in death, and has never stopped being about the harvest of life from this plane.
The Last Sheaf
The part of the tradition that I read on more recently and keep getting drawn to is the last sheaf.
Across northern and western Europe, the final stand of grain in a field was understood to hold the spirit of the crop, driven back and back by the reapers until it had nowhere left to go. Cutting it was not a neutral act. In many places the reapers threw their sickles at it all at once, from a distance, so that no single person could be named as the one who killed it. The responsibility was distributed on purpose. Nobody wanted to be the one who did it alone.
What was cut was then woven. The corn dolly, or the maiden, or the kern baby depending on where you were standing, held the grain spirit safely through the winter and went back into the earth with the first furrow at Imbolc. The oldest surviving fiber-magic tradition in Europe is, in effect, a hospice practice. You kill the thing that feeds you, you make a body for it out of its own substance, and you keep it warm until it can go home. If you want more on figures worked from thread, Thread as Intention covers the wider tradition.
This is the reference of reciprocity, of the give and take. As I dyed this skein, I thought of my old homestead, and of the moments when I would feel reluctance in the harvest.
Reading The Variation
The Reaping is a variegated colorway on a 100% superwash merino worsted, and it moves in one direction only: amber and gold that shift into rust, and touches of green from the summer past.
The gold end is the field before the cut. Standing grain in the first week of August takes a particular light, warm and dry and slightly dusty, the yellow of something that has finished growing and is now simply waiting. It is a full color. It is also a color at the end of its own process and lifetime.
The rust end is what is left afterward. Cut stubble, turned earth, the iron color of a blade that has been used all day and not yet cleaned. There is no significant black in it, because Lughnasadh is not Samhain and the year is not over. What is left is warm, dry, and spent, with the whisper of the prior year lingering over it.
The transition between the seasons is the part that took the most work in the pot. A variegation that moves too fast is more like a stripe in a WIP, which can feel muddled and unsure. This is comfortable, like a long afternoon after a long day of tending the harvest. I wanted the feeling of the colors in the final project to be like hiding in the tall grass just prior to its reaping.
Notes From the Pot
This is acid dye, worked the way I work everything: four skeins at a time maximum, mostly at night, with the intention held through the strike. Lughnasadh's intentions are first harvest, gratitude, skill, and the cost of making. I do not find those difficult intentions to keep, especially as my own garden reaches the point of harvest (tomatoes and squash this year). Anyone who has finished a large project and then had to look at what it took out of them knows the feeling well.
Because it is a small batch, hanks differ. On a variegated colorway this is more visible than usual, since the whole colorway is tonal and any shift in the amber end changes where the eye thinks the turn happens. If you are making something that needs more than one skein, alternate rows. Working With Hand-Dyed Yarn explains the technique. More on the dye process itself is in Hand-Dyeing, and the warm-color reasoning sits in Color Correspondences.
Iron modification is what I'd usually use as a mordant for natural dyes to shift a yellow toward the brown end, which is worth knowing if you ever dye your own. It is also a reasonable description of what the season does to a field.
Possible Workings
Something worn at the throat, I think. The colors sit close to skin tones and behave well against a dark coat, and the merino worsted has enough weight that a cowl or a wide-collared shawl holds its shape without blocking into something limp. It also works as a contrast against a flat dark - Depths will take the gold end and make it look lit from behind - or against the deep red of Blood Petal if you want the whole thing to feel like late September rather than early August.
If you are casting on for it as a working rather than a project, Abundance has the harvest-season frame, and the Lughnasadh knot count is seven. Seven for a cycle completed and the harvest brought in.
The first cutting is done. Mabon takes the second one in September, and the stores keep building toward winter, and none of that has happened yet. Right now there is only the field, the blade, and the honest accounting of what it cost to stand here.
Blessed be.
Tess · Arachne Fiberworks