I have always resisted joining a yarn club of any sort. I felt that I wanted to choose the colours of the yarn I bought and didn’t want a surprise which resulted in me having yarn I didn’t want to use. Plus, it was usually an big investment of money all in one go for said surprise and I just didn’t feel a huge desire to join in. So I sat in my non-sock yarn club corner and played with my skeins of purple sock yarn.

And then a couple of things happened. There was Rose’s Infamous January Growth Spurt which coincided with reading on Lindsey’s blog that she was opening sign-ups for the Waterloo Wools sock yarn club and payments were monthly. I considered it for a brief moment and figured that a) I was in need of some serious cheering up and b) a person can have too much purple sock yarn – and joined.

However, thanks to the crappy postal service, the February instalment has yet to arrive, if it hasn’t already been pilfered by a sock knitting postie, so my first yarn is the March colourway, which arrived this morning.

This colourway is called “Paris Nights” and is inspired by a photo of the Eiffel Tower at dusk, and is just lovely. Completely not what I would ever choose off my own back, but I still really like it and the yarn itself is wonderfully sproingy. And as it’s a 20% nylon sock yarn, it’s already earmarked as being a pair of making-up-for-felting-the-other-socks-socks for Mr B.

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I also realise how much I am off the radar when only today I discover that Alice Starmore’s Aran Knitting is being republished this year. This is momentous news: even Mr B understands the great importance of this event as he helped me try to find a library copy of this book last year to no avail – apparently there are three or four copies in libraries throughout the country but they can’t be inter-library loaned, probably because they have to be kept under lock and key for fear of obsessive knitters pilfering them. Me, I just wanted to knit St Brigid. But now it’ll be an early Christmas present and there was happy dancing aplenty. Here’s to Tudor Roses for 2011.