Be vewwy vewwy quiet… we’re hunting Wollmeise!

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Wollmeise, as there’s probably no need to tell the knitting blogosphere, is remarkably hard to acquire. If you’re a “wollmeise virgin,” acquisition often involves throwing yourself upon the mercy of kind folk on Ravelry and if you you’re not, well, it tends to involve a considerable amount of yarn stalking.

Sometimes, I’m afraid my F5 key will break from the number of times I hit it while I stalk wollmeise. I’ve done so twice, now, once at The Loopy Ewe (and oh, was it madness!) and once on Claudia’s site in Germany. It was considerably more fun to stalk Claudia’s site — although the site is a bit slower, the yarns appear gradually and randomly… and it’s much easier to wait and see if the yarn you’ve desperately been dreaming of turns up. Granted, I missed out on some Veilchen laceweight in her last shop update by waiting just a bit too long, but since I scored skeins in Barista, Poison No. 5 and Vergismeinnicht, I’m not about to complain.  I scored the day I stalked on The Loopy Ewe as well.  That day I learned a fascinating lesson… which is that when yarn is disappearing as rapidly as it does from The Loopy Ewe, one’s mentality shifts from “I really want Wollmeise in these colors” to “I just really want Wollmeise!” and while I was more than thrilled to get my hands on some, I couldn’t help but feel just a twinge of disappointment that the colors I wound up with, though beautiful, were certainly not my first choices (some of which had hopped out of my cart during my attempt to pay!).  In some ways, I feel better about my second set of stalked purchases because I made a choice.  I missed out on some, but it will come around again, probably about the time I’ve finished knitting up some of the Wollmeise I’ve got hanging about in my stash.

Sometimes, I look at the skeins that I’ve acquired through stalking (and a few via Yarnissima’s kits because I’ve happened to be luck the days I’ve dropped by her site) and can’t help wondering if it’s really worth the hype.  The base is soft and the colors are intense and beautiful and complex without being complicated. In fact, the colors are so intense that they practically radiate with a deep glow.  And certainly, the yarns that I’ve been dyeing in my kitchen in the past week or so haven’t gotten to that stage.   They’re certainly worth the trouble I’ve gone to to get them and, yes, I have projects in mind for all of my skeins, and yes, I’m very much looking forward to knitting with them.  The yarn has a fabulous hand.

Then again, part of the joy of having Wollmeise is the thrill of the stalk and the thrill of the kill and the sheer fun of chatting with my fellow Ravelers who are up in the middle of the night looking for yarn or busy refreshing our wishlist pages when we should be working.  It’s fun to score.  It’s fun to celebrate the scores of others, and mostly, it’s fun to have that “skein that got away.”  I know someday I’ll catch it, and I’ll probably appreciate it all the more for waiting.

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