Wednesday, May 2, 2007

Holy Freakin' BFL!

I recently joined my local knitting guild. It seems to be a pretty good group of people. Certainly they are very talented. I am about a generation younger than most of them, but I learned something very, very important from them today: older knitters have better yarn. Or maybe it's just that this is a particularly affluent guild, being located as it is in one of the more expensive areas of coastal California. Whatever. I don't care. The guild had a yarn sale yesterday. Members donated their unwanted yarn and the guild put it up for sale to raise money. I was expecting their cast-offs to look like my cast-offs; you know, the bulky neon green acrylic, the half ball of leftover alpaca, and the scratchy magenta thick-and-thin wool that I bought online before I learned how to decipher online descriptions?


Hah! The very first bag I picked up was 22 (count them!) balls of Bluefaced Leicester at an absurdly low price--so low that my brain momentarily short-circuited, leaving me completely paralyzed for a good two minutes, and causing me to miss out entirely on several other equally good deals because I couldn't get my hands to release the bag long enough to grab the 1200 yards of handpainted worsted from Twisted Sisters ($20) or the 6000 yards of cream colored lace weight alpaca ($10) or the 20 balls of leaf-green mohair ($10). And this was all at the first table! By the time I recovered enough to check out the other two, there was nothing left that I wanted, although there were some lovely things. I can only be thankful that my temporary paralysis prevented me from flinging my body across the table and screaming, "Mine, mine, it's all mine!" like a raving lunatic.

What really surprised me was that most of the women barely gave the yarn a glance. There were ten or fifteen of us rummaging through the yarn, but most of the other 200+ women in the guild were sitting quietly in chairs, working on their latest projects or wandering around socializing. There was even yarn left over--and not crap yarn, either! I passed on about 40 balls of lovely superwash merino in heather grey and cream colors which were still there (calling my name mournfully) when I left, and there was a whole table of summer yarns in primary colors that don't look good on me but would be gorgeous on someone else. All I can think is that these must be some privileged (or very stoic) knitters!

So, anyway, does anyone know what I can make out of 2300 yards of worsted weight bluefaced leicester in a beautiful camel color? Since most of my sweaters take about 1100 yards of worsted weight, and the largest sweater I ever made, with a 50-inch chest and allover cables, still took less than 2000 yards, I'm thinking maybe a house cosy?

2 comments:

Quail Hill Knits said...

And you complained about me buying 22 extra skeins of yarn! You are as big of a stash junkie as I am. I immediately reviewed you profile after your comment. I love it. We DO have a lot in common. I'm not sure what kind of law you practice but by any chance or you going to be at the Collabortive Law Convention in Pasadena this weekend? I'm bringing my knitting and it would be fun to get together.

sophanne said...

I am having serious yarn envy. I think nomoresweaters.blogspotcom has a nice coat pattern in her purl2 links7. It might be worth checking out.

As to the heel turn- funnier and less fixable was the time I turned the heel, picked up stitches, reduced stitches and worked my way to a kitchener stitch without EVER KNITTING FOR THE REST OF THE FOOT! heel-toe redefined!