yarn shopping and the luxury of touch

on friday, i had a few minutes before my chiropractor appointment, so i stopped in at a yarn store a few doors down from their office. i do not knit. i do not crochet. i have done both of these things in the past, but i’m not proficient at either one. it’s still a bit of a mystery to me how some people can make patterns up as they go along. reading patterns just looks like a different language to me. the only things i have knitted or crocheted were no more than one kind of stitch and were made up of doing mainly the same thing over and over and over and over.* but i still love to go into yarn stores and touch. i realize that the store proprietors probably hate people like me who come in and muck up their yarn with my not-pristinely-clean hands (i was biking) and who browse longingly through the store copies of pattern books and who never buy anything. in my defense, i almost never do it. mostly because i almost always (at some point in the visit) find myself thinking, “i should really learn how to knit something cool. this amazingly soft yarn would make a great scarf! you can never have too many scarves! and look, it’s only $20 a skein!” and those are dangerous, potentially expensive thoughts.  at this shop, i was particularly attracted to some soft, giant chunky yarn in gorgeous solid colors and then this funky, satiny looking japanese stuff that wasn’t really yarn at all–more like silk cording, but strong–which they’d knitted up into a purse, but which i kept thinking, “hmmm….. what could i do with this? it’s so cool. i’m sure i could come up with something!” but i have no time to even do the crafts that i’m craving at home right now. in fact, i’m procrastinating by writing this blog entry. sigh. i gotta go write my paper for class. maybe i’ll go feel some more yarn tomorrow… silly me.

*i once taught a beginning knitting class for teens at the library, with the help of a real knitter. i enjoyed the first session where we made knitting needles from dowels, pencil sharpeners, wood oil and some fimo clay for beads on the ends more than i enjoyed the actual knitting. i distinctly remember during the second session, when we actually started knitting and i was laboriously walking a teen through the process of making her 2nd or 3rd row of stitches when she suddenly stopped, looked at me and said, “is this all there is? just this? over and over?” and i knew exactly how she felt.