Too Old to Rock and Roll…..

It was my birthday last month and, as I’m oft inclined, I treated myself to a book or two…..four actually. I got yet another great deal through the Book Depository but, oddly, their prices on some of them have changed quite substantially in the short time since I purchased. I snared No Sheep For You for a mere 9.23 UKP, and Runway Knits for 11.67 UKP. Yet today, the same titles are listed there as 15.51 and 12.29 – in the case of No Sheep, that’s an increase in price of over 65%, so steep that it makes me wonder whether they got it wrong the first time round, and it was just my good fortune to be there in the right place at the right time?

So how do I like my purchases? Well I do have some problems with No Sheep For You. The first hurdle is overcoming the language style used by the author, Amy Singer: she’s clearly not directing her book at a target audience of 51 year olds like myself (but nor should I expect her to). While the ‘twittering & chatter’ is quite irritating to this particular Grumpy Old Woman, I’d go so far as to say that it’s quite likely that she may well offend the intelligence of many twenty-something knitters too. I really do feel that she’s speaking down to her readers as if they were some kindergarten aged group.

Yet this book had the potential for excellence. The first part of it is meant to be dedicated to the ins and outs of the various non-wool yarns, how they are made, what are their qualities, how to overcome their shortcomings etc. But has she told us the full story ? I think not – and there would probably be a few disgruntled yarn producers has she busted the  likely myths surrounding these products that currently imbue a sense of eco-friendly and new agey-ness. I’m talking about the bamboo yarns, soysilks and such. Okay, I admit I don’t know  exactly how they are produced but, to my mind, they are all just rayon: mushed up cellulose (more usually twigs and leaves) that are combined with acetic acid to produce what was the first man-made fibre. And that could well be one of the reasons why, as Singer found, the manufacturers of some of these newer yarns are unwilling to divulge the production specifics. Rayon is a dirty word in many circles – most likely because it is one of the most misunderstood fibres. Some people wrongly label it as a ’synthetic’ – it’s not.  It’s never seemed to have shaken the slightly downtrodden image that people can associate it with  - cheap, poor quality, artificial.  That last word reminds me of the occasion that I saw a reputable shop selling rayon embroidery threads as ‘Pure Silk’.  Because rayon has been known as artificial silk (its sheen and drape etc can mimic silk very well) some thread  manufacturers compacted the name to ‘Art Silk’ and, whilst I’ve never been sure whether it was done to intentionally mislead the consumer, it certainly had that effect.

But back to No Sheep, I feel that the first part of Singer’s book wastes a good few pages of space telling us…well ….nothing much at all. And when she resorts to filling a quarter page with stuff & nonsense about imagining how bamboo yarn just might be made (the story involves pandas and spittle)…….what is clearly intended as a skerrick of light hearted banter, just falls flat on my mature aged, world-weary shoulders.

However, for the pattern section in this book – three quarters of the book is dedicated to knitting patterns – I give Amy Singer much greater credit for her choices. There’s only one or two in the whole bunch that made me recoil.  One being  the misplacement of a motif, drawing (undesirable?) attention to a body part which, in my case, needs no further ‘enhancement’. There were also one or two charts that looked so confusing at first glance that I suspect some knitters might be frightened to even tackle the project.  These could have been simplified without losing any of the required information. But for the rest of the projects, you get the full range of realistic sizings that we’ve come to expect from Singer, and most of the designers have produced classy pieces that work well with their chosen non-sheep yarns.  Most are very wearable – yes, even for those in their fifties and beyond.

As a postscript to this, the latest copy  of Yarn Market News arrived here a couple of days ago, in which there is an article about ‘green’ yarns. The article states that it takes about one third of a pound of synthetic fertilisers and pesticides to produce enough conventionally grown cotton for just one tee shirt. Extrapolated globally, cotton production uses 25% of the world’s insecticides and 10% of the world’s pesticides.

Later in that article it tells us to take care in our choice of ‘green’ knitting yarns, because Soybeans use even more pesticides than cotton in the US.

Now there’s some food for thought….