On Sunday 10 February I went to the Boston Farm to Fiber Festival at the Boston Public Market, which I had been excited to go to since I found out about it a week before. And it was amazing! I had never been to any kind of fiber or yarn festival before, and this was a good first place to start – easy to get to, a good but not overwhelming number of vendors, cool swag at the end of the day, and a great friend to keep me company.

One of the festival’s sponsors was the Taproot Magazine, which I thought was fabulous since last year I bought one of the back issues, “Heal.” I have since read it cover to cover several times. (This isn’t hard to do since there are no ads, hooray for independent publishing!) At the festival, I got last year’s set of back issues, which I am over the moon for (I mean, just look at that cover art).

This magazine, combined with a few podcasts that I’ve been listening to, have made me start thinking a lot about where my yarn comes from. I love to knit, and I certainly do not knit with all yarn indiscriminately. However, even with beautiful hand dyed yarn from indie dyers, a question remains about the source of the yarn. Clearly wool comes from sheep, but where do the sheep come from? Are they local to me? How are their shepherds and caretakers living? The wool must then be processed – where is this done? Is it done sustainably? Or, like most superwash wool, is it coated in plastic in a process that is quite bad for the environment?

These are some serious questions with serious implications! And they go not just for sheep, but for alpaca and llama and all other fiber animal (including, oddly, the silkworm).

I’ve been thinking about the whole yarny process for probably a year and a half now, and I have no easy answers. I love beautiful hand-dyed colors on superwash wool, I love the hand, and I love the sheen. However, I have not been ready to make a full commitment to buying locally made (in the U.S.) sustainably produced non-superwash wool, because while this is a good and beautiful thing, it limits my yarn options drastically.

So the question I have to ask myself is: which option makes me a better steward and caretaker of this beautiful planet God has made?

This is the question I have to think about and answer at some point. For now, I think I’ll stick with natural and non-superwash fibers but also keep using all those indie-dyed yarns I have in my stash.

I’ll definitely do more thinking about this and post about it more in the future.

Until then, I will hunker down and enjoy my half snow day with knitting and tea and an artificial fire.