It IS all about the yarn.  The colors and weight and fiber content and ply and dye technique….Yarn is what knitting is made of, after all.

This fact hit home as Sarah and I were prepping for our knitting class at Camp Stitches this weekend.  We are taking a 3-day design class with Myra Wood (Knitting in New Directions) and needed 5-10 yarns for the sampler project.  Now, heaven knows I can scare up 5-10 balls of yarn from my stash.  No problem.  I have lots of yarn.

But I did not have 5-10 balls of the RIGHT STUFF!  See, Sarah and I see “class sampler” and we immediately jump to “class project.”  We see possibilities — and possibilities are simply not going to happen with the wrong yarns.  And even if our class sampler stays a class sampler, I could not envision knitting for three days with yarn that did not excite me.

I realized that whenever we take classes and use whaterver yarn we can put our hands on (never the GOOD STUFF, of course!), I am miss the buzz.  Terrific techniques are meant to be done with terrific yarn — which is yarn that makes the knitting sing!  And ZING!  The RIGHT STUFF.  The GOOD STUFF!

So Monday morning, we dashed out to our local yarn shop, The Sock Peddlers, and chose our yarn for the weekend.  The RIGHT STUFF.  The GOOD STUFF!

And we are pretty excited!

Now, this is where I would normally pop up a photo of our yarn, but I am in the process of winding all the skeins into balls, so they are not “ready for their close-up, Mr. DeMille.”

BUT we can visit the emerging Halloween Shawl:

And, for a little blast of what color can do, imagine this shawlette:

Done in these yarns:

Yeah, I know..Right?!  And these are all yarns mustered from my stash.  They are GOOD STUFF and, for this piece, they are indeed the RIGHT STUFF!

It is, indeed, all about the yarn.