It Could Happen to You

Hey! Newbie!

Yeah, you, with the half-finished hat and the goofy grin on your face, and the itty-bitty stash that still fits in a wicker basket by the couch. I'm talking to you.

Stop sniffing that fresh hank of merino for a minute and listen. It may be your last chance.

Feeling pretty good lately, are ya? Enjoying your first forays into the local yarn shop? Contemplating the esoteric pleasures of socks, cables, fair isle, lace? Dancing feverishly to the siren song of 100,000 souls given over to the orgiastic joys of the yarn and the needles?

Well, snap out of it. It's not too late for you to get away, before you become what I've become.

All I wanted was a long scarf. That's all. Maybe with stripes. But you couldn't buy a really long scarf back then, in 1992. The best you'd find in the shops was a flimsy strip of woven plaid about four feet long. Pathetic.

So I bought some wool and I learned to knit. I made my six-foot scarf. And I thought, that was pretty fun. Maybe I should buy some more yarn.

Flash forward fifteen years.

I am still knitting. In fact, I am a knitter. Perhaps I am even a Knitter. There are even indications that I may be a KNITTER.

I write a knitting blog. Some people who read the blog will decide, on occasion, to send me a knitterly token of affection through the post.

One such reader lives in Japan. She and I have never met. She wrote to let me know that a package would be arriving on my doorstep. In the package there would be "some roving" to spin. Please note: "some roving."

I came home from work and the package had arrived. A package of considerable dimensions. As promised, it did contain "some roving." Here is a picture.



Each of those two balls of roving measures nearly 15 inches in diameter. Each of those two balls is larger than my whole head.

This, newbie, is the kind of thing that may happen to you if do not drop the needles right this minute.

You may come home one day and find that someone you have never met, who lives across the ocean in a country you've never visited, has taken considerable time, trouble, and expense to ship you a box filled almost entirely by two gigantic balls of animal hair.

And you will find this thrilling.

Is that the kind of life you want for yourself? Is it? Is it?

Yeah, I thought so.

Welcome to the club. Have some hair.