Canadian yarn.

"Oh, oh," I told Bandit yesterday evening, over GTalk. "I have yarn!"

"Yarn?" he typed back. "Where did you get yarn from? Is it purple yarn?"

"It is purple yarn," I replied, "and it's from Canada."

"Oh no."

"Oh no?"

"That is why it snowed."

Oops.

Blown in yesterday along with the (really unreasonable amounts of) snow, was this much-anticipated package from Canada. (Addresses obviously smudged out.) What did it contain, you ask?

Not two days after posting the aubergine poll, I realized that in fact I already had the perfect yarn to knit this shawl.

Several years ago, when I was a beginning knitter still just dipping my toes into the world of nice yarn, a very generous knitter in Canada took my facetious request to take some of her stash off her hands seriously. She sent me some lovely variegated red-purple laceweight. A little abashed, I asked her how I should repay her, or should I maybe trade her something from my stash. She told me not to worry about paying her back. She said I should pay it forward instead.

I knew I wanted to make something lovely and meaningful out of that yarn. It's waited patiently in my stash for almost two and a half years. Now it's reemerged, and I'm thinking, how fitting it would be to take the kindness-gift that was given to me and work it into the kindness-gift that benefits a charity.

The problem was, that skein only had half the yardage I needed. So I scoured online yarn stores for more, and found none. Then I searched the yarn tabs on Ravelry until I found the single listing that was for sale or trade. I contacted its owner, and we quickly came to an arrangement that resulted in another skein of yarn being sent to me by another very kind lady from Canada.

And now I have yarn. Sufficient yarn, even! It's a little darker in real life than shown in this photo, but still, I'll probably overdye it with a little bit of dark gray and blue to get it to the perfect shade. As soon as I can get all my dyeing stuff in the same place (half of it is in Utah!) I can cast on. I'm beading the very outer edge, so I can knit most of the shawl before addressing the matter of choosing the right beads - perhaps a transparent pale gold, or a muted lilac?

Oh yes, I should mention. The pattern that the recipient chose is Vostok by Beth Kling.

I am really excited to get this started.