The yarn store

There is more history than I really want to spend time on at the moment, but I've been trying to find good fair isle sweater wool. I know, I know: Jamieson's. The thing about that is, and I'm just being honest here, Jamieson's is really, really expensive. Sure, you're buying little tiny balls of 25 g only, so you don't notice it as much as, say, when you're buying a 100-g hank of some lovely handmaiden merino. Nonetheless, it's pricey. I can't ignore it. And no one around here actually sells it, so I'd have to do a little bit of speculative purchasing and it's pricey. And the shipping costs and so forth.

So I tried webs and valley yarns and it was not the most successful experiment in the history of experiments. It wasn't expensive, so that's better, but I didn't come away feeling like I'd found a formula for getting the wool for the sweater of my dreams (the one this blog is SUPPOSED to be about). I was left slightly hemming and hawing again, which isn't the way to start the SOMD.

But I also want to knit and I also NEED a replacement for my current, raggle-taggle fair isle. And a little bit of low(er)-stakes practice of techniques wouldn't hurt, either. So, naturally, I turned to my favourite cheap workhorse yarn. I don't know what it's like where you live, but in my neck of the woods (the Canadian Maritimes), Briggs and Little (from, surprise surprise, the Canadian Maritimes) is pretty cheap. It's not a bad wool -- it's cheap because it has a propensity to have vegetable matter in it, and the spinning can be somewhat uneven. Also, it's not from fancypants sheep. Workhorse wool.

So, off I went to my local yarn store and spent a good half-hour piling up skeins in the window. I'd put two side-by-side and then return one to the shelf and then try again with something else. There are different ways to buy wool, right? There is the way where you sit at home and say "I want to make a RED sweater with GOLD accents and BLUE trim" and you go to the shop and look for the colours you had in your head and they don't have them so you re-evaluate and re-adjust until you find a red, blue and, let's be honest, not at all gold but in fact slightly different red combination that you can live with. Then there is the other way of shopping where you go to the store knowing that they will have something nice and you just have to spend a little time finding the nice thing for yourself. That's what I did. (I don't think it's the cheaper way to shop, by the way ... I strongly suspect that this is how stashes get so big.)

Anyway, with only the desire to come away with colours enough for some decent fair isle effects, I went straight to the Briggs and Little wall and started playing. I had learned through the Valley Yarns experiment that I needed to see the wools in natural light. It wasn't a very bright day and there was another customer trying to muscle some window space for herself. I can't imagine what the scene would have looked like to passers-by, but I live in hope that we were amusing.

I came away with one set of three colours I thought would blend well, and two sets of two colours I thought might flow nicely one to the other. The colourways didn't clash horribly, but since there were different numbers in each, and since I hadn't actually selected them to go well with each other, I decided that the sweater would be one where there was a colour and there was black on every row. Then I paid (not too painfully much) for my skeins and took them home.