In addition to the giant balls of yarn, the Unravelling the Tight Weave piece in VIVID4 includes a large scarf. Well, it’s not really a scarf. Kathleen calls it a “piece of knitting”. Granted, it is 50 feet long, but to me, it looks like a scarf.

Part of this was leftover from a previous dance work she created for Nuit Blanche a few years ago. And part she’s added over the past few days. For three days straight, I listened to the click-clack of knitting needles as she made the scarf longer. Finally, with gnarled and cramped hands, she announced the knitting work was complete. Complete, but not finished. Apparently the scarf was not exactly the right colour and the colour of the new additions didn’t properly blend into the old colour.

“I need to dye it,” Kathleen announced. “Tonight, for rehearsal tomorrow.” I quickly deduced this was code-speak for “Jeff, I know it’s past midnight, but I need you to go to the 24-hr Shoppers Drugmart and get a bunch of boxes of black fabric dye.”

Now, when you dye an item, it needs to be simmered on the stovetop in the fabric dye like making some sort of black wool soup stock. We found a metal bucket downstairs, but of course the 50 ft scarf wouldn’t fit inside. “We need two pots,” I concluded. Our gaze fell on our two pasta pots sitting on the kitchen shelf.

So we plopped the pots on the gas range, stuffed half the scarf in one pot and half in the other, poured in water and dye and fired up the burners. Sensing imminent disaster, I quickly grabbed the fire extinguisher hanging on the kitchen wall and checked the charge. I was envisioning wool touching the gas flame and the whole scarf igniting like the Hindenburg. Meanwhile, Kathleen had grabbed a wooden spoon from the utensil drawer and was stirring the black soup, humming happily to herself.

They say wool repels water. Not in the weird physics experiment Kathleen was conducting on our stove at 2:00 am. Each half of the scarf was sucking up water, and there was hot black dye dripping on the stove top between the two pots. “More pots,” I shouted. We shoved in another pot and a stainless steel bowl to catch the drips. Kathleen grabbed a white tea cup, dipped it into a pasta pot and drizzled the black potion over the exposed ends of the scarf, still humming happily. This was the most bizarre sight I have ever seen in our kitchen.

In the end, the colour of the scarf had changed marginally (apparently the wool just did not want to take dye), our wooden spoon was now black, and the ignition on our gas stove had become wet so that it kept going click-click-click-click even after we turned the burner off. I unplugged the stove and we went to bed.

Check one more prop off the list.

If you come over to our house for pasta in the future, you may want to forget you read this.