Frabjous Yarn

[One Popular Science Magazine, two pieces of graded homework, one ball of red yarn (Bad Dog!), one empty toilet paper roll, two cups of coffee, and one vitamin…]

Good Morning! I went on another yarn crawl yesterday with my nice friend from Chix who is kind enough to do all the driving and who has excellent taste in yarn, patterns, and, of course friends. We went to FRINGE where I bought way too much beautiful yarn, we ogled the gorgeous hand-dyed yarn the owners make, and then talked about Stitches Midwest.

Same good friend and I had gone to Stitches, but I hadn’t talked about it because… I wasn’t that excited. I didn’t go to any classes, and, while there is a world of stuff to be learned in knitting, after doing it for over 30 years, I’m really OK with my skills and preferences as they are. I have no interest and no time for getting involved in spinning or raising fiber creatures, and, most everything else I’ve either done or can figure out with a few good pictures and one reliable introductory pattern. I suppose I’m jaded.

Anyway, we did go to the yarn market. It was better than the best yarn store, however, there wasn’t anything this year that really grabbed my attention and made me want to set roots into the floor until I could claim it as mine. There were lots of hand-dyed yarns, many, many shop displays, and a nice little corner where I sat down and knitted on a square for a local group’s Project Linus blankets. I did do one thing that I’ve been wanting to do for many years – I got to see and touch qiviut yarn. (I just found out it’s pronounced KIV-EE-UTE, not kwivet, as I had previously seen and said. Love learning new stuff!)

Now, the legend dwelling in my head says that qiviut yarn is made from hand-plucked fibers from the undercoat of the Alaskan Musk Ox. Possibly wild musk oxen, but even my imagination has some limitations. I’m pretty sure it must be hand-plucked because building an apparatus for musk ox undercoat removal doesn’t seem like a big market to me, plus, just thinking about standing in front of a musk ox and saying, “Hey, pass the musk-ox-undercoat-plucking apparatus” makes my tongue dizzy. It’s reputed to be the most expensive yarn in the world. At $82 for a teeny tiny 2 oz. ball of superfine lace weight yarn, I’d have to say that sounds accurate. It was definitely $82 dollars worth of slobber-inducing softness, though, and I’m glad I got to finally fondle some.

Anyway, when I brought this up yesterday, the shopkeeper asked, “What would you make with it?” I couldn’t think of a single thing that I’d want to spend such an unspeakable amount of money per yard on, and the first thing that popped into my head was, “Nothing. I’d keep it in my pocket like a talisman to fondle, and on the last day of my life I’d swallow it and yell, ‘I’M TAKING IT WITH ME!’ before I check out.” After we all finished peeing in our pants, I bought enough lovely Blue Heron yarn to make Bunny a sweater, and we toddled homewards.

I have no idea what came over me, but it’s probably closer to the truth than I can easily admit to.