Opening the yarn

After I got home, I opened my mailer-bag of yarn. (I ordered two skeins for a gift-Hitchhiker, but also got two skeins of sockyarn for myself).

I did something probably nearly every avid knitter has done - I smelled of one of the skeins. Good yarn, wool yarn, smells good. It smells more or less like lanolin (depending on how highly processed it is). It's a warm, dusty, slightly animal smell. It's a familiar smell to me and one I like. (I suspect most knitters who work a lot with wool like it). To me, it smells like home and comfort and relaxation - me, tucked up in my big chair, knitting on a sock or a shawl.

Other yarns have other smells. Alpaca is kind of like wool. Cotton has less of a scent, it is more "dry," it's kind of like clean bedsheets. Silk can be very different (some silk smells really bad, especially when it's wet - almost a marine smell, like dead fish). I don't remember synthetic yarns as smelling like anything.

(That may be one of the reasons Waldorf Schools - which teach knitting as part of the curriculum - tend to shun them. I once read about knitting at Waldorf Schools and one of the teachers remarked that they only used natural fiber yarns, because (I'm paraphrasing a bit here) that if the children used synthetic fibers, they'd lose some of their ability to know what was "real" and what was not.

Um. Okay. I admit, I like some of the tenets of Waldorf teaching (the spiral idea, where you go back and revisit certain topics later, when you're older, and gain new insight and new information about them. And the idea of teaching handwork in the school....I think sometimes fidgety kids are fidgety because they don't have enough physical to do in school). But I have to admit some of the stuff gets into a more philosophical and less practical-mindset headspace than I usually inhabit, and it kind of makes me go "What?"

But I guess there are more sensory aspects to a natural yarn (even down to, sometimes, having to pick bits of vegetable matter out of it, which I don't really mind) than a synthetic.

So yeah, I mostly prefer natural fiber yarns. Acrylics are good for some things - they're good for making amigurumi, for example, because the firmness and lack of stretch works well with the typically-sculptural way of crocheting. And they're good if you want to make a kid-sweater you can throw in the washing machine and not worry about. Or if you're knitting for someone you know won't heed your specialized care-instructions. Or for someone with multiple allergies to things like wool or other fibers. Or for vegans. But for myself, for people like my mom that I know will follow the care instructions (really, pretty much anyone who is themselves a knitter or a seamstress will, most likely), I prefer natural fibers. Mostly wool, some alpaca. (I really LIKE alpaca, but it's even warmer than wool - so not quite so good in my climate).

***

A sad story: I guess the murder of the ECU baseball player has made the national news. (Perhaps, partly, because it's such a horrible story, if it happened as presented). Apparently the young man was out for a jog, and a couple of teenagers shot and killed him. Because, allegedly, they were "bored."

I suppose the fact that we're more or less collectively horrified and outraged by this (at least from the commentary I've seen) is a good thing; we've not yet accepted that such a thing happens. (Though I will note that there are an awful lot of kids killed in Chicago, mostly as a result of getting caught in the crossfire between gangs, and you don't really hear a lot about that). But I will say...."bored"?!?!

I don't know. When I was 16 and 17, I don't think I was still complaining about being bored....when I was younger, if I did, my parents would assign me chores. Or when I was really little, my mom would do stuff like say, "Okay, draw me a picture of a cat then" or something like that.

And yeah, yeah, I get it: differences in families. Maybe. But I still can't wrap my head around it. And it makes me think of two things - first, the infamous Leopold and Loeb killing (bored college kids, decide they want to commit "the perfect crime," so they kidnap and kill a kid). And I think of a book - I forget the title or author - that one of my high-school English classes read, about a group of Japanese teens who, realizing that if they commit a crime before the age of 14 (IIRC), they will eventually be pardoned for it under the Japanese penal system. So they plot to murder the (again, IIRC) father of one of the boys (or maybe it was another boy at their school, I forget). (I tried searching for it based on themes I remember, but Google just keeps serving up anime or manga, and this was a novel, not anime or manga.)

And in all these cases there's just a coldness there that I can't understand. I guess it's a strain that's existed in humanity forever and bubbles up for different reasons (Leopold and Loeb apparently thought they were superior....). But it's just sad. And kind of horrifying - the guy who was killed was minding his own business, he didn't even know his killers. That's probably another reason why it made the national news- the sensationalistic aspect of it, the "this could happen to you, too, you know" aspect.