Yarn Is All Around…

…and I never knew it.

It wasn’t supposed to happen. About eight years ago, I was happily obsessed with beads and doing the occasional not-very-good watercolor or acrylic painting. Oh, sure, when I was in grade school and ‘Little House on the Prairie” came out on TV, I got my grandma to teach me how to sew and crochet (for some reason, the woman despised knitting). I pulled out my crochet hooks once to make some afghans for Christmas presents, but that was about all.

Then, about seven years ago, I got some unspun wool fiber to make these adorable needle-felted Christmas ornaments that were in a magazine. But I had leftover fiber, having grossly miscalculated how much the ornaments would require. So I thought I would needle felt some of it into other stuff and it was fun, but there was still too much wool laying around. Then I saw some darling felted flower pins, but they were crocheted and I couldn’t find affordable wool yarn. “I’ll spin that wool into yarn and crochet the flowers! It’ll be easy and I can use up the fiber and that will be it!”

That WAS it. Just not the way I expected. It took over.

Once I started learning to spin, I realized that yarn isn’t just the brightly-colored balls or skeins on the shelf at the craft store or the yarn shop. The magical act of twisting fiber shaved from an animal’s coat, or a strand of fiber extracted from a plant or a filament extruded through a machine from a pool of chemicals is yarn, and it is EVERYWHERE. Your jeans are made of woven yarn. The towels in the bathroom are made of yarn. Your favorite ratty old t-shirt that you splattered Spaghetti-Os on is made of yarn. The carbonized thread Thomas Edison inserted into his light bulb was made of yarn. The carpet you walk on (and holy crap, it needs shampooing!) is made of yarn. The straps on your gym bag are made of yarn. The curtains are made of yarn. The terrible oil painting that resulted from your brief if-Bob-Ross-can-do-it-so-can-I phase is painted on canvas made of yarn. Shoelaces begin their existence as yarn. What started out as a way to fasten things together a hundred thousand years ago is still around and it is still everywhere. And it is awesome.