Textile Innovations

By guest blogger Jana

I’m working right now on the Amiga cardigan from Knitty because Kay’s already made about 10 of them and I feel like a slacker. I’m using the tsumugi silk from Habu because Kay used it for one of her Amigas and I’m apparently imitating both sisters this summer. It’s working up beautifully, and it got me thinking about the explosion in textile technology over the past three decades.

I began as a crocheter in a tiny West Texas town where the only yarn available was crochet cotton or coarse slick acrylic in fluorescent orange and harvest gold. In the early 1980s I lived in New York City. I didn’t have enough money to buy “good” yarn from yarn stores – which were intimidating places anyhow because I was a newbie knitter and New York yarn store owners back then were rude and dismissive. Even so, I did venture into a few to marvel at the variety of wools and textures. Boucle. Hairy alpaca. Silk yarn so breathtakingly expensive I didn’t dare touch it. Most of my yarn purchases were from the ubiquitous five-and-ten-cent stores that dotted Manhattan, and were some variation of acrylic or cotton. I took a couple of classes at the Fashion Institute of Technology and learned how synthetic fibers are created, never dreaming that this same technology would be applied years later to materials that still seem totally 24^th century.

So, 30 years ago, there was wool, cotton, linen, silk, rayon, and acrylic yarn. What do we have now?

How about yarn made of crushed pearls, jadeite, sugar cane, pineapple plant, milk protein, soy, corn, New Zealand possum, hemp, bamboo, paper, yak, electrical conductive fiber, musk-ox, buffalo, and mink? (Yes, there will soon be yarn at Looking Glass that is mink – sheared mink, mind you, wherein no minks were killed to get the fiber. I still can’t wrap my head around how the heck you shear a mink. Also, “mink” starts sounding really silly when you say it a dozen times in a row.) I fully expect to hear soon about yarn made from coffee beans and dog biscuits. But please, not yarn from cat food. I have enough of that in my house already.