Oooooh this is juicy Fen!

I know that precious feeling well. I love good materials, and ironically that can make me too precious with them, as if they must be saved for the version of me who is finally worthy of using them properly.

Beautiful materials can become strangely intimidating. They almost gather a little halo around themselves and start asking us to be more impressive than is useful (this is actually just us projecting our own insecurities onto them, but boy does it feel this way!).

But I’ve found, over and over, that intimacy only grows through encounter and interaction. Through touch. Through repetition. Through letting the material and the body get acquainted.

Relationship is really the thing, isn’t it?

We don’t become attuned to materials by protecting them from experience. We become attuned by working *with* them. By stumbling a little. By getting to know how they behave. By letting them surprise us! By making the “wrong” thing often enough that the material stops being someone we’re afraid of and starts becoming a collaborator we recognize.

I really love that you cast on just to feel textures.

That feels like the exact right kind of beginning.

Sometimes the skein wants to become a finished object. Sometimes it wants to become a conversation first.

I’d love to know what you’re discovering in the texture itself. What your hands like. What your nervous system does when you let the yarn lead a little.