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Knitting on a Budget: It Can Be Done!

© Suzanne Griffith

Yarn is the palette of the fiber artist, and just as a painter has to have paints, a knitter has to have yarn. There is a lot of beauty out there to tempt the knitter into spending money. Your local yarn store and mail order houses offer designer yarns in colors that will fire your imagination. When I walk into a room full of these rich colors and textures, I often feel like I?m traveling on the ancient Silk Road with a merchant caravan.

You can buy wool, including washable wool, for a warm pair of socks, mohair for a soft, droopy sweater, exciting novelty yarns that will sparkle or shine in a shawl for evening wear, linens and cottons for summer sweaters, and, perhaps the ultimate, handspun and handpainted yarns from professional handspinners. And there?s more, both in yarns and knitting supplies, like handcrafted needles made from Brittany and others in ebony and rosewood. And don?t forget books and magazines - there?s informative literature on both patterns and techniques, as well as specialty books on subjects like ethnic knitting (Fair Isle, for example), socks, mittens, and lace.

Time for another credit card? It depends. If you have a good-sized budget for knitting, well go for it! You might as well spend your money on something gorgeous! But sometimes others, especially Significant Others, can't understand why these items are a necessity. Some of us have to watch our money carefully, as it tends to fly out of our hands, and some have limited incomes. I have a teenager - now that?s an expensive hobby which severely cuts into my knitting expenditures!

There are alternatives. Adapt patterns and yarns. Spin your own yarn. Buy cheaper yarn at discount stores. For the intrepid, reuse old yarn. I?ll talk about these methods in coming weeks. For right now, I?d like to emphasize how much you can save, and how much you can accomplish, by planning and creative thinking. Let me give you an example of something that could happen to you:

Yesterday I visited the annual Senior Crafts Fair in our little town. I was reminded that three years ago, I bought some yarn at one of these fairs - several skeins of a light-brown tweedy wool from a former crafts shop owner who was going out of business. It was cheap - about $15. But it wasn?t a good buy because it?s still sitting in a bag on a shelf. There?s not enough of it to make a sweater with (my family is not large in number but is large in girth). It?s too rough for mittens or socks, and I don?t want to make several hats out of it. I would have been better served by spending that $15 on designer yarn I was inspired to use, or on a knitting book that I would have read by now. So I recommend having a project in mind before buying yarn, and, better yet, looking at a pattern, determining the yarn requirements for the size of garment you want to make, and then looking at yarns that would be suitable for that pattern.

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