No Cigar

I went looking for commercial BFL yarn in a shop, found it, and left it there.  It was very pretty, ready to be knit into a sweater, a heavier weight than I want, and four times the cost of the same wool top unspun. 

Going into a yarn shop is a weird and awkward exercise for me, as I learned to spin yarn before I learned to knit and with rare exceptions I have knit pretty much only handspun.  The owners tried to make me feel better by saying everyone experiences ambivalence and hesitation over the purchase of a sweater's worth of yarn.   

Speaking of unfamiliar shops and seeing yarn in a whole new way, I recently discovered that embroidery shops sell cards of yarn in various shades of colour.  I was prepared to see skeins of floss but there were these wee cards each holding several yards of angora yarn, several yards of alpaca yarn, and so on.  Also there was a wall of wool yarn in various colours tied in skeins that looked meager to me.

My perspective has evidently been warped by casual exposure to friends' garbage sacks full of alpaca fleeces, tubs full of angora hair, pounds upon pounds of wool locks, and vats of dyestuffs.