Contemplating Fibre

I slept in just a little this morning, did some laundry and then stopped in at my study.  My knitting bag is out in the front hall and I'm feeling just a little too lazy to go out and get it.  I only have 20 minutes, so I looked round at the piles of work sitting right close to me.

I picked up the blanket I started for my aunt.  Its such a nice pattern to knit, such a marvelous rythmic thing.  But oh how I wish the yarn was wool.  In wool, this would be a masterpiece.  

I'm working on a pattern round, so its knit 2 together, knit 2 together and then yarn over knit yarn over knit, in endless music right around the ring.  Midway through the round the tips of my fingers are a little sensitized to the yarn.  

Its not unpleasant yarn. It does have good points.  It is going to be very easy care.  The colour really is a gorgeous melange of turquoise and deep green and forest, old growth and moss, and the tiniest bit of shimmering silvery white. On the plain knitting rounds I don't notice really, but on these pattern rounds,  I tend to use my fingers just a little more intensely.  It probably means I'm knitting just a little tight.

But it isn't wool.  Wool, even at its most coarse, is silky somehow.  It stretches and moves and runs along the grain of my hand.  Even so far removed from its sheepy source, there is a life to it, a hidden spring within it that pushes back.  When I knit a stitch with wool, even the coarsest most crisp and harsh of wools doesn't make my hands tingle except in anticipation of more. 

I believe you have to work with a yarns best points to make the nicest things with it. It is as true for these very ordinary acrylic yarns, perhaps more so, than it is for the finest of wools.  Still it is a very pretty colour and once it is washed and dried and beaten within an inch of its life by heat and water and more heat, it will feel a little closer to the heaven of my dreams for this blanket.  

But I really wish it were wool.