Overwhelmed

From the first day, working at a yarn store has been a joy, an eye opener and a mystical magical experience. I find the process of handling great yarn just an absolute pleasure. It feels like Christmas as each box from suppliers is opened. It is a gift all over again, to fondle each yarn as the yarns are priced and put away. Among all the glory that is yarn, I managed to stay just a step removed for the first little while. I had the dream of yarn in control. After a 15 years doing accounting, the entire yarn store experience was just a little surreal and I did not trust that I would not wake from the dream.

About 3 weeks in, I recovered. The yarns started being something just to enjoy, and play with and it has stayed that way. I enjoy them. Nothing is finer than digging through hanks and hanks of yarn, touching and feeling them. Sometimes the quantities are overwhelming, like not too long ago when 10 chair sized boxes came to the store at the very end of the day. Even you are overwhelmed by volume, it's fun. Peeling back the layers of bags and bags of yarn is like turning the pages of a good book. You just have to go through it, urged on by the story that is unfolding as you turn the bags of yarn to see the next layer.

Each bag of yarn arrives sealed, and has to be priced and labeled before it can go on the floor or back into the stockroom. That is when the real fun starts for me.This is also where it gets hard.

I can see the skeins of special yarn sitting on a shelf in the very neat stash room that I have in my head, I can see me sitting enjoying its company while I have a well mannered cup of tea, while I visit with it. I would get to know the yarn, become friends with it, and then I would knit it into a lovely lovely sweater, or hat, or soft warm wrap. I can see myself swathed in the comfort of it all the rest of my days.

Not a day goes by when I am in the store, that I don't fall deeply madly in love with yet another yarn. Sometimes it is the colour, sometimes it is the feel of the yarn as I hold it. There are so many wonderful colours, fruitful reds and eggplants, fields and forest of greens, soft waves of blue, so many wonderful textures, smooth, soft, crunchy, warm, papery, buttery, that each day there is a moment when I know nothing could get better than this.

Working as many days as I did through late June and July, I was becoming accustomed to the rush of good yarns. It was part of my expectations of how a day would feel.

Returning to work after a spell of days off? Whammo. Smacked upside the head, sunk, snookered, landed flat on my back. I was absolutely overwhelmed by the loveliness of a yarn, and by its truly rich colour. For a short time, the earth stood still and all I could see was this one absolutely lovely yarn.

I fell under the spell of a pile of hanks of rich red Cloud Cotton. (Colour 112) It doesn't look like much, sitting there among the other colours, does it? It looks like a nice mannerly red, an ordered red.

But I tell you, I swear, that this mild mannered soft deep rich red, has a wild and dangerous heart. It will sweep you off your feet, even if you have a hundred hanks of other reds, even if you already declared a new favourite yarn for the day. Why yesterday, a day when things were going along just fine, when I had already chosen a new favourite yarn, when I knew and had seen the colour before, did this yarn make me weak in the knees?

I have no idea, I just know that someday soon, there will be a bag of great red Cloud Cotton in my real world. I wouldn't have been able to control myself at all, but the kitty is empty.

Will work for yarn. Literally.