Musings About Christmas Yarn

For Christmas my wonderful husband's big present to me was a box full of yarn.  Delicious, spectacular, colorful YARN!!!!  While opening presents, we were in our PJ's and sitting next to our gas fireplace.  All warm and cozy, and even then, I kid you not, I got chills when I opened this box of yarn.

My fellow yarn lovers will know, a box of yarn can be a magical thing.  It is not just delicately twisted, dyed, and wound up string of varying thicknesses.  It is potential.

I'm going to get a little nerdy, so bear with me here.  If you're learning basic physics one of the topics when studying energy and force is potential energy.  The most basic example of potential energy is placing (to keep us at least a bit on subject) a ball of yarn at the top of a hill.  Although, of course, none of us would ever subject our precious yarn to touch outdoor ground unless the house was on fire and the only way to save the stash would be to toss it out the window.

While at the top of this hypothetical hill, the yarn has the potential to roll down the hill with its 100g mass with the help of gravity and the height of the hill.  Potential energy is the energy stored in an object, such as this yarn at the top of the hill... but I don't think that's quite true in the figurative sense, at least not when it comes to yarn.

The potential in yarn goes so much farther than a skein's relative mass and distance above ground.

When opening that box of yarn you ordered to make family and friends Christmas presents, sometime around August and September, you don't see hours and hours of selfless knitting for others.  You see the look on their faces when they open and pull out the personalized garment of their favorite colors made just to fit them and their personality.  Even if you never see this FO again, you will hold in your memory their faces and how their hands lovingly touched what you knitted for them as they eagerly put it on.

When I opened that box of yarn the Husband got me this year for Christmas, I saw hours and hours of selfish knitting... for once!  After knitting selfless gifts for the last few months, this is the best present I could have hoped for.  Of course the yarn, but the gift of the potential.

Here is how some of that potential is coming along so far.  I'm preemptively calling this the Rainbow Fish cowl.  I'll work on publishing the pattern when I'm finished and satisfied.  I'm using Knit Pick's Hawthorne Sport Multi in Happy Valley.  You can find my Ravelry project page here.