If, in his memoir by the above title, Nabokov is correct in his assertion “a point arrived at by diminishing large things and enlarging small ones, that is intrinsically artistic,” then I have have a rather large ball of yarn that just might qualify as Art:

This ball of yarn is usually kept in a part of my house known as the yarn annex, which contains any number of items I have used in various projects over the years; the annex houses what could be described as a collection of curiosities for the fiber enthusiast. There are hooks of various sorts, bins of yarn, empty candy boxes I mean to use for something some day, buttons by the thousands, four large pieces of burlap, and a range of projects in various stages of completion.

As for this particular ball of yarn, it came into being nine years ago when I had a job where I found myself sequestered in an office removed from any other offices on the second floor of a library. As jobs I have had go, it wasn’t the worst, but there were large expanses of time to fill, and when a student who had come too late for student government elections wanted to have a seat on the student council, a sequence of events began to unfold that lead to the creation of this ball of yarn.

After her initial complaints, the student returned to my office with paperwork for me to sign. She had done some research and learned that the president of any club was given a seat on the student council, and she asked me if I would be willing to sponsor a club of which she would be president. Seeing an opportunity to create even more crochet enthusiasts, I told her I would be willing to do it, as long as it was a crochet club.

In short order, she returned to my office with a yarn and hook so that she could learn to crochet. In no time at all, she had recruited half-a-dozen people who were as determined to learn to crochet as I had been when I started. In order to foster more interest in our club, we decided to attempt to create the world’s largest yarn ball.

The ball pictured above is as far as we got.

At the end of the year, the position was eliminated. I packed up my personal items, which by then included this ball of yarn, and it has been with me ever since.