Naming a yarn is tricky business. Most of my yarns names have some link to Scotland because it's where I have lived for almost all my life. There are some wonderful words like scunner and glaekit and fouter and fankle, but they all have slightly negative meanings. This is especially true of fankle. This is the mess you get when you drop three skeins of just dyed hot wet yarn on the floor and it turns into twisted spaghetti before your eyes, which is what happened to me last week. I gave the resultant mess to my friend Isabella aka Spinning Fishwife (and she returned the favour with a large bag of rhubarb from her allotment) and she roped in a couple of helpers at Broughton to return it to a knittable yarn.
Names need to be pronounceable. There's not much point in calling something Buachaille, for example no matter how beautiful it is. And what about Sgurr nan Ceathreamhnan, gorgeous place, but as a name for a yarn? Probably not.
I don't think Gaelic is as impenetrable as Welsh to non native speakers (and I am not one of them, by the way), but even so, it's silly to make life awkward.
My original choice for the new yarn was Cairn, but after some thought I think I am going to save that for another yarn. It's a great name, but it just wasn't "right" you know?
The new yarn is called
Clan.
Why?
Well it has 8 plies. Whatever form our families take, we all have 8 great-grandparents. A link to our past.
It's a smooth yarn which lends itself to all kinds of knitting. All of us, no matter how conventional or smooth our lives have been as individuals, have richly textured families. The eight great-grandparents would be fascinated I am sure, to see us, their great-grandchildren.
The yarn is good for twisted stitches and lace, and it's superb for colourwork (just wait until I show you a mitten I have in my possession).
It's a yarn for creating a knitted fabric, which is what a family or a Clan is, a plying together of individuals in which the whole is greater then the sum of its parts.
I am looking forward to Tuesday, 1st September when I'll be inviting you to be part of the new yarn club, to join my Clan.
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