Earlier this week, I needed to stop by my local yarn shop to pick up some additional yarn for a project I'm working on and was lucky enough to score a special $20 off anything in the store coupon. That's like being a kid in a candy store to me. After much deliberating, I selected a beautiful hank of 100% Alpaca in a rich Nutmeg color.

Browsing through the rows and rows of richly colored yarns, feeling the glorious textures, I'm finally learning a tough lesson about yarn - the finished project is only as good as the materials used. Stephanie Pearl-McPhee talks about this in one of her books. She compares it to cooking and if you substitute mediocre ingredients in a recipe that calls for more expensive & rich tasting ingredients you're going to end up with a mediocre dish instead of what the recipe intends. It's the same with knitting - I just have to retrain my brain to be okay with buying a $28 hank of yarn instead of the Jo-Ann's $3.99 discount yarn. That's the difference with knitting and cooking. It's not as drastic of price difference between margarine and butter, or milk and heavy cream as it is between acrylic yarn and silk, wool, cotton, or alpaca yarn. But you can tell the difference in the finished project.

Lucky for me I had the $20 off coupon so I only paid $8 for the luscious alpaca. Now I'm trying to find the right project for this yarn. I have 665 yards to work with and I'd like to knit myself a shawl with it, but haven't found a pattern that I like yet. All in good time.