I love yarn.  I love just about everything you can do with yarn.  I can just see pictures of yarn and feel all warm and fuzzy, no pun intended, but you might wonder where that phrase came from, if it is not an inherent property of yarn.  Those of us who knit and crochet have a special affinity for the way the yarn feels when we run our hands over it, both before and after the formation of any stitches. 

My mother-in-law recently passed away, and my brother-in-laws thought I might want her yarn.  They brought the yarn in the original bags she had stored it in and just left them at my house.  I  felt so honored, like they had bequest me with a great inheritance, a very personal and special part of their mother’s legacy.   I guess really to them it was just their mother’s bags of yarn, but to me it represented so much more. 

Modern knitters and crocheters are usually working with exotic and beautiful fibers with exotic names.  They may be hand-dyed or hand-spun.  They are not the garden variety of acrylic worsted weights that women of my mother-in-law’s generation used when they lovingly made afghans, baby blankets, and pillows.  This bag of yarn might look like something from a thrift store to a modern knitter, working with big needles on a fuzzy, textured yarn in deep hues.  What the modern generation of yarn lovers don’t realize is the torch that these precious ladies carried with their little crocheted animals and pot-holders.  This is probably a dying breed, an extinct kind of thing.  However, I was part of it as a young bride, and one of the people who encouraged me to work with yarn was my dear mother-in-law.  I soon far surpassed her in skill and knowledge, and I had more money to spend on supplies than she ever dreamed of.  This bag of yarn represented money carefully tucked away a few cents at a time to buy the yarn she so enjoyed working with.  There were scraps of former projects, frugally preserved.  Remnants of  baby blankets made for now grown grandchildren were in this bag.  Of all the baby items I have saved of my children’s infancy, these blankets were the most precious to me.  

This bag of yarn is so special to me. Although I truly do have a stash of yarn and other craft supplies that amazed even my family when we moved and it was discovered, this bag means more to me than all  of that.  I have often seen the little phrase, “She who dies with the most stash wins.”  But, I don’t really think that is true.  I just don’t measure stash that way anymore.