Ok. I admit it. I have to admit it. I’m a yarn snob. Having raised alpacas – and still owning a couple – I am also an alpaca snob. I think this makes me an ALPACA YARN SNOB of the very worst snobbiest sort.

I visited Yarn Expressions, my local yarn store, for the first time yesterday. There wasn’t much fiber in the store – after all it’s a yarn store – and I was disappointed in the fiber. Oh, the colors were striking and the colorways were probably great. They just begged me to reach out and touch the yarn – which was disappointingly wool – not just any wool, but a not very soft at all wool. Scratchy. I know, I know, coarse wool has it’s purposes. It’s good fiber. It just doesn’t feel like alpaca, etc., etc., etc.

Yuck!

Don’t get me wrong. Yarn Expressions is a nice yarn store – and as large as I’ve ever seen. I’m not yucking the yarn store – I just, well, didn’t like the feel of that spinning fiber.

Ok, so they don’t have much fiber, but they have a lot of yarn – yarn in exciting colors all over the store.

I moved on to the yarn. Yarn Expressions has as large a selection of knitting yarns as I have ever seen. They have lots of brands, colors, weights, fibers, everything. They have most of the yarns lauded highly by the popular blogs. They have yarns I have read about for three years, but never seen. Unlike hobby and craft stores, they have yarns containing actual natural fibers and not very many yarns containing 100% synthetic fibers. I worked my way through the yarns feeling the yarns.

And I was mostly disappointed.

While some of the merino yarns were VERY nice merino yarns, most of the yarns felt, woolly in the bad, scratchy, sense of the word. All these fancy, blog-lauded yarns I’ve been waiting to feel. All these wonderful wools I’ve been wanting to try.

With a few exceptions, they all felt disappointingly woolly.

I am truly a yarn snob.

Please, nobody take this post as a bashing of Yarn Expressions. They are a good store with nice, helpful, people. If anything, this post is a bashing of self. Clearly, it’s not the store’s fault that I am an alpaca snob! I plan to return to Yarn Expressions and I plan to spend money in the store.

And please, I’m not really against wool. I still wear and enjoy wool. I can probably wear most of the wools at Yarn Expressions against my skin. Wool is warm. Wool is fire retardant. Wool is a natural fiber. I really wish I could say I’ve got nothing against wool – but this is clearly not true. Honestly, the only thing I have against wool is that it isn’t alpaca!

I didn’t buy yarn. I feel bad not buying yarn and not supporting my LYS. I drooled over some silk and almost paired some handpainted silk with millspun alpaca in a double-ended crochet experiment. I really want to try a technique I have seen that involves crocheting with two colors and a double-ended hook. I really like the effects I’ve seen using one strand of variegated yarn and one of a solid color. The handpainted silk and brown alpaca I found would have worked well.

But I didn’t buy it.

I fondled some Rowan wool – nice, soft, wool but I can’t tell you which Rowan – in a tweedy oatmeal and a warm tweedy brown. The colors would have worked well in the technique I want to try. The colors were very nice. The wool felt good – not alpaca, but good. The yarn was the right weight. It was less expensive than the handpainted silk. I really like the yarn. I think I could have made a nice project with it.

But I didn’t buy it.

Pam asked me why I was willing to test a pattern and technique with handpainted silk, but not with handspun alpaca. If this seems odd, remember I work retail, but have a very large stash of alpaca fiber.

I didn’t have an answer for Pam’s question. When I think about it, part of the answer is that I haven’t put handspinning effort into the purchased yarn. Part of the answer is that much of my alpaca stash comes from animals we don’t own anymore – some of it from animals I never expect to see again. Handspun alpaca from my babies is special yarn. Handpainted silk is just money. And that’s only part of the answer. It’s not the whole answer. That’s part of my thinking, but that’s not the whole of my thinking. I still don’t have a really good answer for Pam.

Anyhow, my long anticipated visit to my LYS was a bust. Please, though, don’t blame it on the store or the wool. Blame it on Kim, the alpaca snob.