Thursday, September 15, 2011

A Crack in the Sidewalk

Did you ever get completely obsessed with something and you couldn't get it off your mind?  That's what happened to me with this:
Periwinkle Sheep Watercolors Sock Yarn in the Crack in the Sidewalk colorway. 

Hmmmm...how to explain this obsession to you?  Other knitters will know exactly what I'm talking about (I hope...) but non-knitters may be able to relate if I explain it right.

Karin from the Periwinkle Sheep (that's a link to her online store but if you want to buy her yarn and you are local, you can get it at The Spinning Room) brought this in to the shop in early July-ish.  She only had one skein and brought it to get some feedback about the new colorway.  Normally, I might be a little "meh" about these colors (I love purples, not necessarily grays and greens), but when I saw the name of it, I just had to have it.  The name for the yarn was so incredibly imaginative and appropriate for the colors and I just loved it, the name and the colors.   "Crack in the Sidewalk" -- get it? the gray is the sidewalk and the green is the grass growing out of the crack in the sidewalk!  The skein was immediately it snapped up by a customer, so it was gone.

 Now that I think about it a little, I think it reminds me of that children's book Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein [click here to see it on Amazon: Where the Sidewalk Ends 30th Anniversary Edition: Poems and DrawingsChildren's Classic Literature by Age) ],  which I LOVED when I was young (very funny, silly and imaginative poems).

Well, I couldn't stop thinking about it.  Mind you, as she left that day, she said she couldn't bring me any more yarn until after Sock Summit (a sock knitting convention in Portland, Oregon) since she had to bring everything she had there.  And that wasn't taking place until the end of July.  And it would probably be some time after that since she'd have to dye more yarn.  How was I going to wait that long?

In early August, Paul and I went to Cape Cod (Ooh, do I have a beach story for you!....but not today)  and I kept pointing to  sidewalk-y things that looked like the colors in the yarn:
(Got a little eye rolling from Paul about needing to stop and take this picture...)

This was a whole month after I first saw the yarn and in the weeks before then, I often thought about it.   I talked about how creative I thought Karin was for naming this yarn the PERFECT name.  August 1st came and Sock Summit was over and I started asking Deirdre at The Spinning Room if she had seen Karin yet.  FINALLY the yarn came in and Deirdre was so nice and gifted it to me!!!  I was sooooooo happy to finally have it.

What am I going to do with it?  I think I'm going to make a simple pair of socks with no pattern so it just shows the colors well and when I wear them I'm going to show them to everyone and tell them the name even though I know they might not fully appreciate why I love it so much. Love. It.

Can you relate?  Comments please!

1 comment:

  1. I get "yarn worms" (like an ear worm?), too! The Crack In the Sidewalk name has such a potent visual hook - definitely will keep the mind turning over and the eyes seeking it everywhere.

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