So, as I mentioned previously, Kathleen really does not know what the finished dance piece will look like until she starts it. But in this case, she knew, somehow, that she would require larger-than-life balls of yarn. Like 2 ft, 3 ft, 4 ft diameter large.

Now, you can’t just head off to the nearest knitting supply store and get a 3 ft. diameter ball of yarn. We would need to make them by wrapping yarn around something spherical. The answer appeared one evening while I was soothing our 14-month old son by bouncing with him on our exercise ball. The next day I was in the sports store.

“Is the exercise ball for you?” the clerk asked me.
“Well… it’s for my wife, actually.”
“How tall is she? We need to find the right size ball.”
“Well, she’s about 5’10”, but it doesn’t matter. We’re going to wrap the balls in yarn to make giant yarn balls for a modern dance piece.”

Surprisingly, this revelation didn’t freak him out. Turned out he had two daughters taking dance lessons, and as I paid, we chatted about dance in the manner of non-dancers who become involved in the dance world... we don’t exactly understand it, but we’re happy to be supporting our loved ones.

The next hurdle was how to get the yarn to remain in place on the slippery rubber ball. Spray adhesive seemed to be the way to go. So late one night after we put our son to bed, we pushed back the dining room table, spread a drop cloth on the dining room floor and sprayed an inflated exercise ball with adhesive. One of us would then hold the ball and twirl it, while the other held the yarn and fed it onto the ball, pausing every once in a while to spray more glue.

After about ten minutes, it looked like the concept would work. Then came a frustrating two hours of twirling, feeding yarn and spraying glue where it seemed like the ball would never get completely covered. Believe it or not, it takes a lot of wool to cover an exercise ball. And then, after a few more turns, a giant ball of yarn appeared in front of us.

We were both slightly sticky from adhesive overspray. The dining room floor was slightly sticky. And we had probably inhaled enough toxic volatile organic compounds to knock about three days off our life expectancy. Funny, Kathleen is so health conscious, she won’t eat canned beans, for example, even if they’re organic, because she’s concerned about ingesting BPA from the can lining. But she had never even thought of wearing masks or doing this outside. A certain madness overcomes Kathleen when she’s lost in her art.

Alas, we still had three more balls to go. To help keep the yarn on the ball without needing a whole can of spray glue, we came up with the idea of gluing foam padding to the ball and then wrapping the yarn around that. This brought up another problem that sent my engineer’s brain into overdrive. How do you cover a spherical surface? For some reason, I thought the concept of Buckyballs had to be involved. Turns out it’s a lot simpler. A baseball is covered with two pieces of leather, stitched together. So I simply googled a basic pattern for a baseball cover, cut out the two pieces of foam, and voila:

For the big ball, we had concerns about fitting it through doors and transporting it. So we took the large exercise ball to the rehearsal studio, inflated it, covered it and then rolled it around the studio while holding the yarn.

This was actually a lot of fun, and we got a good workout.

In the end, the former exercise balls looked like balls of yarn, and Kathleen’s vision had come to life. Now she just had to figure out how the dancers would actually use the balls in the piece. For me, when I see those yarn balls come out on stage during the premiere, I’m going to try and resist the urge to turn to whomever is standing next to me and say “I made those. They’re exercise balls, you know.”