Early on in this whole pandemic thing, when everything had been on lockdown and particularly so in our area, the county north of us decided that a customer could buy something online and the shopkeeper could hand it to them outside now. You could have that close a contact, briefly. Youcouldn’t browse, you couldn’t go in, you couldn’t touch their credit card machine, but you could do that.
This is when they were still trying to figure out the details of how covid-19 is spread.
I talked to one of my local shops, saying that what I wanted was two bags of a particular blue Malabrigo Rios that matched so that I would have enough for an afghan. I knew that officially it’s ten skeins per bag equals one dye lot; rumor, though, is that they’re matched up in groups of ten but that the mill produces more than that in each lot. But that’s a rumor.
So.
Turns out the whole supply-chain mess meant the shop didn’t have and couldn’t get them in from Malabrigo for months.
But maybe her yarn rep had them on hand, she wondered.
Turns out she did.
Once those were delivered, I swung by the shop, they handed me the bags out on the sidewalk rather than frisbeeing them from, y’know, six social feet away through the car windows and all that and it was so good to see actual human faces again, not to mention old friends.
(Unspoken: Still here. Still here. And you too! Stay that way. Thank you for wearing those masks. Pray those vaccine researchers get their studies finished fast.)
I waited till I got home to see if my initial quick impression was correct. It was.
She’d been so relieved that the two bags matched like her rep had been sure of.
Now, here I interject a quick story about my folks visiting the dye works for a tapestry weaver in France at a time when they decided they needed just a bit more of this one color for their project, so the dyer was asked to create more.
He asked Mom if this and this matched.
She said no, not quite, and why. But no, sorry.
He hadn’t thought it was discernible but since clearly it was, he added just a touch more to the pot. There you go.
So blame it on the genetics. Here I was, staring at those blues, going, but they’re just not quite the same. This one’s more vibrant. This one’s darker. You can put them in all kinds of different lights and it doesn’t change the fact. It’s certainly not a huge difference, but…
So instead of becoming the next big project they’ve sat there for all this time because I can’t use them together unless I separate them by enough other colors and space that the difference might not matter, in which case I would no longer need twenty skeins of Matisse blue because half of the afghan would be something else altogether. Which has had me wondering if I should ask my friends who do diving and photography if they have a particular reef photo I could use, to riff on last year’s fish theme.
I’ve been musing about trying to match the one or the other, but I don’t know if inventories are back up yet.
Here, let me finish this other project first before I worry about it too much.
I just like to know what’s ahead.