our love is a ball of yarn

You know how it is, that first meeting with an attractive ball of yarn.

You go into your LYS, and find stacks of yarn, divided by brand, source material, expense.

There is a grid of colour on the walls, each ball pitching an idea, hoping to be on your needles.

There's the insecurity of the novelty yarn, fussing with its sparkles and light, hoping to catch your eye. Yarns with print so bold, they brand themselves on your conscious, inspiring you to pick it up, fondle and move on.

Your eyes dance from ball to ball, each yarn an excited suitor wanting a space on your dance card. You have no cares in the world; like a bee in a meadow, or like a butterfly moving from flower to flower.

It doesn't matter, because you have time to look, to squeeze, to think - whatever shall I make with this? Is this the right colour for me? Nah. Moving on - because at times, all you need is yarn, and the air that you breathe. Life is good.

Then, it happens. Your eye is snagged by a particular yarn in the corner. It doesn't fuss, doesn't preen, does not need to. You buy just one ball, to see how you'll get on with it, mind. No harm ever came from a pretty ball of yarn.

But like in all relationships, probably your infatuation didn't work out. You try to explain to your friends. Yourself.

The yarn.

"It's not that you aren't pretty," you begin, trying to come up with some excuse why you only bought one ball of yarn that you won't use, and can't see yourself buying more, not wanting to appear shallow, or worse, feckless.

"It's just that... well..." you gesticulate, finding out that a shrug of shoulders isn't as elegant and eloquent as novelists make it out to be, and that sometimes, you just have to grab for that old chestnut. "It's not you, it's me."

The yarn is Louisa Harding's Impressions - the same ribbon, string, mohair yarn I spoke about in the last post - but in a different colourway. I bought this yarn the first time the line came out in the UK.

I love this colourway - it's as if you stumbled onto a lake in autumn, on a day so crisp, so fine you laugh with simple joy.

There's the leaves in the colours of fall, ranging from amber, to blood orange, slumbering in a lake so still that you can see the shock of the blue sky threading through, with the black edges holding you back on the sturdy earth, keeping you from doing an Ophelia, your dress floating with the fall of leaves from the trees above.

All this, before you wake up from that ever so vivid dream, blinking the mist and mohair from your eyes and going, "Oh."

Man, I love this yarn, but it has mohair in it, and mohair makes me itch, although I admire the effect it gives.

These gloves are for a friend of mine. She's here at Sectus the Harry Potter convention in London. It is the last book in the series, and we've argued, made up and now will commisserate at the events of the last book.

The gloves are my commencement present.

I'm going to London on Sunday to see her, and to give these gloves to her, and hope that she gets even a fraction of the joy I had knitting them, flirting with the yarn, trying to find a relationship with it, only to say, "It's not you, it's me."

The ties are done in Rowan wool/silk in an olive green colour.

Can't say I like that particular yarn, bought a ball for a panta, but the girl left before I could cast on. The ball I got was replete with knots, and the yarn pills easily, I think it's the silk.