Hooked!
Yesterday we went to visit the in-laws. It wasn't the most conveniently timed visit, because Vince had been hoping to make our joint birthday weekend into one long board-gaming extravaganza. As it was he had a few friends over on Saturday to play Lords of Waterdeep and is having an open house this afternoon for some more board-gamey goodness, so he can celebrate his birthday in true nerd style. Anyway, some friends of Vince's family were visiting his parents this weekend, and in spite of the n00b being almost a year old they had never met her. Naturally this was not an acceptable state of affairs, so Vince was forced to give up a day of boardgaming and visit his mum and dad.
I was lured to Cheshire on the promise of a trip out in the morning (sans n00b) to visit a yarn fair. While I do enjoy a spot of knitting or crocheting from time to time, the idea of a 'yarn fair' was not as attractive to me as the idea of getting out for a morning without the dratted baby. As much as I adore my daughter she is my full time day job, and as a consequence I appreciate the occasional morning out of the office. Especially as she has now developed the ability to shuffle herself into places she shouldn't be playing in, and the necessary manual dexterity to pick up things she shouldn't have and hide them places they shouldn't be hidden. This naturally requires an increased level of parental vigilance, especially when we go out shopping. It is now necessary to keep the pram at least half a metre away from shelves and shop displays at all times and to check it thoroughly for contraband before leaving, just in case she managed to get within arms reach of something while I was momentarily looking elsewhere.
So off I toddled with my mum-in-law and two of her friends, expecting to be politely interested in wool shops while breathing the free air and enjoying such un-motherly activities as using both free hands at the same time. There were some nice little stalls, each one selling an assortment of pleasant modern patterns, knitting needles and accessories, and of course Yarns.
It took a few minutes before I began to notice what was different. There was hardly a ball of wool to be seen anywhere! Everything was beautiful rich rainbow colours arranged in tied skeins, allowing you to examine every strand before deciding to buy it. Intrigued, I made a fatal error. I picked one of them up...
It was not made of wool. It was a blend of silk and alpaca hair. It was the softest and nicest thing I had run my fingers through since brushing the n00b's fluffy baby hair that morning, and I was immediately seized with an urge to bury my face in it. This obviously showed, as the nice young lady who ran the stall conspiratorially whispered "I know, don't you just want to bury both your hands in it?". Before I could reply, the young man behind me interjected "I just want to roll around in a big pile of it like Scrooge McDuck!". Clearly the whole room existed in a state of politely restraining their sinister yarn-urges, and having surreptitiously snuzzled some, I couldn't really blame them. The urge to buy everything on the stall was quickly suppressed when I looked at the price tag, hand-dyed luxury yarn is not cheap. Too late I realised that I had become addicted to a luxury I could not possibly afford. I confided my unexpected yarn-yearnings to my mum-in-law's friend Carol, and she sadly agreed that the noble hobby of knitting was merely a gateway drug by which one was eventually introduced into the cult of yarn. Some poor addicts of her acquaintance had cupboards full of the stuff, and never enough time to knit it all into actual useful garments.
Luckily, I knew this couldn't possibly happen to me, because I can only afford to buy the really good stuff once or twice a year, so I eventually succumbed to the lure of the silk-alpaca blend in my favourite dark red colour. I spent all of my birthday money in record time, and now have a nice new pattern to crochet, and just enough fiendishly expensive burgundy fuzz to finish it.