My life will be a journey of searching for the perfect yarn, but it will be a journey without an end because there will be hundreds of yarns that I will meet that will be perfect for what I use them for.
And there are two categories in the search for the perfect yarn; the perfect yarn that is commercially made, and the perfect yarn that I will make.
To me, the perfect yarn will be a 100% natural fibre, and it won’t be superwash.
I have a weird hang-up when it comes to superwash. I’ve heard rumours that it’s horrible for the environment, that it takes a ridiculous amount of water to do the process and that the chemicals used are not water soluble so they just float on the water and don’t break down (kind of like oil). Whether or not these rumours are true, another reason I don’t like superwash is because I’m a bit of a purist…we went hundreds of thousands of years without it, but when they created dry-cleaners in the early twentieth century, our collective brain forgot how to wash wool so someone had to figure out how to make washable wool. And don’t even get me started on the chemicals used in dry-cleaning.
However, I do like acid dyes better than natural dyes…
I digress. The perfect yarn will be of natural fibres. It will drape perfectly, it won’t agitate my skin, it will have a beautiful hand both in the skein and in the finished object, it won’t have any pattern affecting knots, and I may never find it. I kind of hope I don’t because it’s the search that counts.
Delly Bean 