Free Hooked for Life by Mary Beth Temple Page B

the upside of inexpensive acrylic yarns—they last forever, can stand up to constant use and cleaning, come in every color in the rainbow (and several that Mother Nature I am sure never intended), and an afghan’s worth of them will not require six months of credit card payments. They are readily available in all parts of the countryand can be used in all sorts of projects from afghans to baby clothes. Intellectually, I understand. Tactilely I am just not sold.
    I want to feel natural fibers running through my fingers as I work. I want to pet the alpaca at the fiber farm, and then buy the fleece or the yarn that came from his furry butt. I want organic cottons that will weather like my favorite pair of ancient jeans or linens that are sharp and crisp and then soften with use. I want colors that glow with inner warmth and call to mind beautiful sunsets or roiling ocean waves. In short, I want the expensive stuff.
    How expensive? I think the most I ever spent on a skein of yarn was sixty-nine dollars for some gorgeous teal qiviut. Sadly, there was not much teal qiviut about 213 yards of a fine-gauge yarn. It hasn’t turned into anything yet—it’s still in a skein, looking lovely. And that might be all it has to do to make me happy—I haven’t decided yet. Am I happy with my purchase despite the fact that it took me three days of petting it to get up the nerve to plunk down the cold hard cash? Even if it never turns into a scarf? Even if there are starving crocheters in wherever that would never in their lives buy yarn made from the undercoat of a musk ox? Yes. And hey, maybe I could write it off on my taxes, since I just wrote about it!
    To rationalize my yarn purchases, I have gone from saying, “This yarn is X dollars per skein” to “This sweater will cost X dollars.” I find per project costs to make much more sense to my occasionally cheapo brain than a per-skein price. And with some yarns, if you figure out how much they cost per ounce you realize that you could have bought filet mignon or raw gold more cost effectively. But even the cheapo part of my brain doesn’t object to paying a few bucks for a high-quality item that I know I am going to get a lot of use out of… even if I have to wash it by hand.
    Does this make me a yarn snob? Remi says yes (but she smiles when she says it, so it’s okay). I say no—I am not a yarn snob so much as an experienced fiber artist who knows how to purchase the supplies that make me happiest.
Snob
has such a negative connotation. Perhaps I could be a natural fiber enthusiast instead.

Crocheter vs. Stash
    T he dream: Okay, I am going to clean out the stash today. I am going to organize, sort, make notes so I don’t buy the same thing twice, and dig out all of the things I won’t get to in this lifetime and get rid of them. I am going to finish all the works-in-progress, or at least put the patterns and parts together in an organized fashion if it turns out there are rather a few more of them than I remember. I will condense, I will combine, I will find room in the stash closet where none existed before and this time,
this
time, I will not fill up the newly created space with random yarn purchases (which are not my fault because as we all know, nature abhors a vacuum and you can’t fight physics). I will once and for all put all of my unassigned hooks in one needle case so that I will have at my fingertips the one that I want when I need it, which will save me tons of money because I won’t have to run to the store for hooks every time I start a new project, and therefore will spend less time succumbing to temptation in the form of wool. And I will do it all today. Amen.
    The reality: I decide the first order of business will be to get all the stash in one place. It’s all in the stash closet, right? Oh, except for the underbed storage containers in the guest room. And the pile of wool in the cedar chest. Um, there might be a bag (or six) in the living room—stuff I