A Good Yarn

Photo Cred: Jackie Kelly

During my trip to Scotland last year

Disclaimer: If you are not a knitter you will probably not understand the majority of this post.

However, you will probably think it's hilarious and ridiculous that I would go to this extent to write this much about knitting.

If you are a knitter you will probably sympathize with me on a lot of this.

Or maybe you are a knitter but you'll still be with the other lot and think I'm ridiculous.

To each his own.

Read on at your own risk.

Side note: My punctuation and skills at writing long chunks of text are not the greatest so excuse the foreseeable/excessive amounts of run on sentences.

Whenever I read one of Stephanie Pearl-McPhee's books (for those of you who don't know, she writes hilarious essays about knitting. She has like eight books. I've read them all. Multiple times. Fangirl status over here), I always think in knitting terms and scenarios a little bit more than usual.

Granted, I think like that a lot. 

Being the avid knitter that I am (except in August. When it's too beastly hot to think of anything yarn related, I don't care if it's cotton). 

However her stories and anecdotes always turn the gears in the knitting side of my brain (which is a rather large part I have to say) a little faster. 

And so I was thinking today about yarn. Glorious yarn. I've spent more money in yarn stores than most people spend on a normal shopping trip. Ok, maybe not quite, but pretty darn close.

I remember telling a friend once, a few years ago,  how much I spent at one of my local yarn shops (which there are a scant number of, they all keep going out of business, it's extremely depressing) and she didn't believe me.

The words "You spent THAT much on YARN?!" were possibly used, several or more times.

I actually wrote about it in this post over a year ago. 

(Note: that whole thing about not knitting in movie theaters? Totally out the window now.)

But anyway, today I was thinking about the various types of yarn you can acquire.

In my mind, there are two different categories:

There's craft store yarn and then there's yarn store yarn.

Craft store yarn is like buying clothes at Forever 21.

They're cute, they're cheap, but they don't last very long and after a while your dress gets a little pilly and discolored after a few washes.

Granted, you can find a pretty good dress if you shell out a few extra bucks, but overall the quality isn't the greatest.

Yarn store yarn is like buying clothes at Anthropologie.

They're not cute, they're gorgeous, and as soon as you walk in you just feel this overwhelming sense of peace and wonder at the beauty that lays before you.

Until you check a price tag.

However if you do decide to splurge, you know that that dress will last you for ages and ages, if not the rest of your life, and it won't go pilly on you and the sleeve won't rip off on your third wearing of it.

That's how I see it anyway.

Don't get me wrong, some of the stuff you can buy at your local craft store isn't bad. I like most of Lion Brand's yarn, and Paton's and Bernat make some good stuff too.

But the stuff you get at the yarn store is the good stuff. 

Noro, Rowan, Malabrigo, Koigu, Manos Del Uruguay... the list goes on and on with even more obscure names that you're not quite sure how to pronounce but represent beautiful skeins of soft, colorful and glorious potential knitted goodness.

However I cannot afford to buy a $25 skein of Cascade 220's Magnum every time I want to knit up a new cowl (and that's not even the really good stuff).

So most of the time, it's craft store yarn.

But every so often I splurge on something or pull out that beautiful skein of cream colored handspun Adrienne Vittadini that I've been keeping in the stash for two years and knit up a new hat.

People ask me how I don't get tired of knitting and I'm honestly not sure. 

Because I really don't.

I think I've just come to the conclusion that knitting is in my blood. 

I've been doing it for the past 13 years so if I'm not tired of it now I never will be. 

How about you guys, do you knit? 

Can you sympathize at all with what I'm saying?

Or am I just a future Crazy Cat Lady to you...

I feel like most of my readers aren't knitters since I don't write about knitting all that often, but maybe I'm wrong?