Mo-hair, Michelle remembered with a laugh from one teenage recipient asking me quizzically thirty years ago. MO-hair! Tell me, he demanded, What kinda animal is a MO!?
He was in foster care and admired Richard’s and my Kaffe Fassette coats of dozens of colors and in his enthusiasm ended up with a vest of his own from the leftovers.
I saw him recently and thanked him for changing my life: his reaction to what I’d made was what got me started on seeing how important it is to knit for others.
There might still be a few other skeins in there all these years later, here, let me see.
Backing up a bit: I was thinking some of the bins in the family closet had some empty space by now that could surely be put to use, but it’s really hard to wrangle them out of there and heavy lifting was out of the question.
A certain someone was happy to dive in there for me if I would go through them. It would make it easier to get at the puzzles and games, too.
Consolidation has begun.
Five games (how did we end up with three Balderdashes? Answer: because people kept gifting it to us) and a stack of puzzles that still had the original shrink wrap on them (no missing pieces on those!) all got claimed by friends today.
Some of the yarn… Showed its age. Not by its condition–I store wool well–but by the archeological dig of my knitting history as I went through stuff.
Thirty-five years ago really soft wool yarns were hard to find.
I remember the first time I found baby alpaca. The late Robin and Russ sold it in–I think it was 25 gram skeins. Today I re-found some of that, all dyed by me because at that time you could have it in brown or you could have light brown but I didn’t find white anywhere till later.
Back then, too many of the really fine-fibered alpacas were being turned into shearling rugs rather than sheared, while the farmers were paid by the pound for the wool, and spikier thicker fibers weighed more for less work.
But as the hand knitting market for the good stuff grew, the quality improved. I thought my discovery was so great then, and compared to the rest of the market it was. But (picking up skein after skein today) I’d hesitate to even grade it as baby alpaca now. It’s okay, it’s just not swoon-able.
So I’m stuck with the same problem I had the last time I did a major overhaul of that space: what do I do with these? I have them because I liked them but to actually sit down and knit I’m always going to reach for something that my hands love as much as my eyes do. The really good stuff is stored in the other room.
In particular (eyeing one bag of white loopy boucle and measuring it at 1.23 lb including its ziplock) what do you do with this (it came out of the alpaca bin but I’m sure it’s wool) that just isn’t getting any more enticing over time? How does one in good conscience keep the good stuff for oneself and fob the lesser off on someone else?
And yet, at the time I bought it, I was that someone else who was delighted to find a natural fiber yarn I could afford.
Oh, and, the seven ounces of aran weight purple-blue wool/angora. Who put meh wool with angora in 2002? Or: given that the words angora and mohair were at the time used interchangeably to describe mohair goats till the trade association came down on it to stop the confusion, is there actually any rabbit in there at all? And yet, it does have that softness mixed in. Hmm.
I’m not driving yet, re the post office, and Michelle’s flying home soon. Hmm.
Michelle looked around at all those bins and exclaimed, clearly trying to undercount it to be nice, You need to not buy any more yarn! And the stuff in the other room–you have enough for, for, like, two years!
We both heard Richard guffawing quietly in the other room. Oh honey.