As this is a yarn about yarn, I need to begin this post with the two characters that are featured, Caroline and John Wise. The hats and scarves we wore in this photo up on the Oregon coast were made by Caroline. The beany she’s wearing has some indigo-based blue stripes. That yarn was dyed by her, while the rest of the colors were naturally dyed yarns from France. My beany is made of yarn gifted by Stephanie Engelhardt, my sister-in-law, and was handspun over there. My scarf was knitted from yarn we picked up from a shop in Luneburg, Germany; on a previous visit, Caroline sprang braided her scarf from yarn she won at a guild raffle here in Phoenix.

You see, when Caroline and I travel, we stop at yarn shops. We’ll go out of our way to visit these stores, such as this one that was temporarily set up at a Chowder Fest in Coos Bay, Oregon, by Driftwood Yarns and Candles, which normally finds its home a bit up the road in Reedsport, Oregon. As a matter of fact, that green and yellow skein has now been transformed into my newest pair of socks.

While I had just unboxed an instrument that was picked up on our way to coffee, you see in the background some yarn being transformed into socks. That yarn came from Newport, Oregon, but not from the same trip as the yarn above. This is an older photo, and while we visit many familiar yarn stores along that Pacific Northwest Coast, we try to get at least a skein or two for me so I get to wear souvenirs from our various journeys. While I rarely, if ever, remember where the yarn has come from, Caroline has a pretty impeccable memory for these details, often filling in information about what we were doing before and after our visit to a particular shop and maybe even a quirk or two from the owner or their shop pet.

These became my favorite pair, although all of them are mostly my favorites. What made these (which happen to feature yarn from Portland, Oregon) special was that they were knitted while we were whitewater rafting the Alsek River from the Yukon west to Alaska. They were finished on the second to last day of a two-week adventure as we were camping at Alsek Lake. I took this photo from our campsite looking out towards the Alsek Glacier.

Last year, I was in Berlin for a music conference a couple of weeks before Caroline and I met up again in Frankfurt; she asked that I visit Woll-Lust for her. She’d eyed some yarns she fell in love with, so I simply had to go. The funny thing is that the majority of the yarn in this photo were things I chose as impulse buys for socks I’d like to see Caroline make for me in the future. None of them are socks yet, but that’s okay as it takes her 40 hours to knit me a hand-fitter pair; I can be patient. On the other hand, two skeins, one variegated with orange and one of the very orange skeins, are currently being knitted up.

While in Budapest back in 2018, we stopped at 1001 Fonal, which translates to 1001 Yarns. There is a bummer about picking up so much yarn when we are traveling, especially when it involves flying, as it all has to fit in our baggage to get it home. However, when I was in Berlin, I requested to have it shipped to America and not to send it until a few days before we left Europe. We’ve had the same problem when visiting bookstores such as Powells in Portland, Oregon, and wanting to leave with 25 pounds of new reading material. The burden of nerds.

Here we are on a rainy day on the coast with Caroline wearing another handmade beany. This one is yet again made with yarn collected on the Oregon coast. We have a soft spot for Oregon, and the more memories we can carry around with us, the better. The yarn that is on the five needles required to make a pair of socks is from Wollmeile in Vienna, Austria. Do I need to tell you that they are one of my favorite pairs?

Another pair of socks being worn for the very first time. Can you guess by now where the yarn might have come from? If you guessed Oregon, you’d be correct although these are not from the coast, the yarn came from Knitted Wit in Portland, the same as the Alaskan socks above.

These are just some of the socks Caroline has made for my feet. She had a pair at her desk that needed repairing of the sole as they were getting thin, and had I seen them, I would have collected that pair, too, for my photo. The socks just above these are currently on my feet, so I figured that was okay as I had the photo.

The top row of socks, starting with the green-striped pair on the left are from Fiber Factory that was right here in Arizona. The pair of orange and blue to the right came from the same shop. The 3rd pair from the left is from somewhere in Oregon, while the fourth pair is too, but from Newport. The red and green are from the Espanola Valley Fiber Arts Center in New Mexico. The sixth pair is from Knit Happens in Scottsdale, Arizona. The yarn provenance of the next pair with blue, dark red, and green is lost in the fog of time. The last two pairs on the top right are from yarn bought in Haines, Alaska.

The bottom row of socks from the left starts with the Oregon socks I described in the second photo. The second pair are the socks from Wollmeile in Vienna that I wrote about a couple of photos ago. The dark purple socks are from Germany. The blue-gray socks are from Germany and were knitted by my mother-in-law, Jutta, with help from Caroline and Stephanie, my sister-in-law. The blue and red socks in the middle are from Frankfurt, Germany. The colorful yellow-red-blue glitchy pattern is also from Knitted Wit in Portland. The light gray and dark gray pair is also from Frankfurt while the next gray pair is also from Germany. The second to last pair is from Fiber Factory. The last pair is from the Yarn Barn in Florence, Oregon.

Not only do I have nearly two dozen hand-knitted pairs of socks, but I also have two made-with-love plushies. This Love Robot (Mochimochiland pattern “LuvBot”) was smuggled into Europe back in 2013 without my knowledge, and then, at an opportune moment, Caroline surprised me on the Polish border with this gift celebrating my 50th birthday. You can’t see all the binary digits around my birthday gift, so I’ll just share what it translates to J 50. What else the reader cannot know, and I may not be able to adequately relate to you, is the tenderness, love, and delight that Caroline brought to this moment of pulling Mr. Robot out of hiding. Not only had she made it without my knowledge, not only had she slipped it into our luggage prior to leaving the States, but she’d kept it under wraps until just the right moment in a unique location that would forever punctuate her presenting this gift of love. You would have had to see her eyes and the emotion that came with getting one over on me while surprising me at the same time.

And just as this yarn about yarn started with the two main characters spoken above, so it ends. This was a gift to me ten years ago when Caroline knitted this caricature of me, notice the gray hair, with her wrapped in my snug arms, the embrace of love (Mochimochiland pattern: “Hugs and Squoze”).