SOAR Wh*re

Overall, the SOAR community grows yearly with the newest crop of first-timers, or SOAR virgins. Of course, that must make the rest of us SOAR whores.

I think it has a nice ring to it.

We need t-shirts or buttons or something.

After three days of cutting up Pendleton blankets and cashmere sweaters and carding and ravelling cashmere sweaters (entertaining as it is to see a sweater disappearing into a spinning wheel orifice, I don't think any county fairs are likely to include a shawl-to-sheep contest any time soon) and plying and cabling and boucléing, I have quite the little collection.

I'd forgotten how much I love making garneted yarns.

The best thing about this class with the always-informative, gracious and lovely Judith MacKenzie is that my inability to toss out a file-drawer-full of silk blouses from the eighties has been vindicated, not to mention the fibre-based eBay habit (there was an unrelated and shorter but no less obsessive bout with lampwork beads on eBay some years later) in which lust, avarice and weakness caused me to acquire cones of luxury fibre yarns way too thin to knit with (unless carried with multiple other fine coned yarns of which I had plenty, see phrase beginning with "lust" above. Yes, recursion probably captures the essence pretty well), as we cut silk scarves into strips and plied them with thin yarns, the bumpy partially-hidden pale pink skein above being one such exemplar.

And the very matted multi-coloured angora that was too expensive and pretty to toss or give to nesting birds and squirrels, but too matted to spin comfortably can now be separated into spinnable fibre and mats for garnetting.

You'd think I had nothing to spin, no stash, nada.

No handpainted merino-silk rovings, nor cashmere (natural white, fawn, brown or dyed in clouds or rovings), yak down (bleached or unbleached, carded or combed not to mention in blends), alpaca (suri or huacaya), lama, silk (bricks or tops, tussah or bombyx, handpainted or undyed), optim, seacell, tencel, bamboo rayon, kid mohair (in locks or roving), yearling mohair, camel down, blue-faced leicester (handpainted or natural brown), cormo, corriedale, columbia, polwarth, or even dog.

You'd think so, wouldn't you?

Fortunately in just nine minutes I can become one with the throngs salivating at the still-closed doors of the SOAR vendors' market.

Narrow escape, that.