Blog parade: Yarn

Last month I posted my first entry for the blog parade Daniela from the German blog Gemachtmitliebe.de is hosting. She's asking a different question for bloggers to answer every month. Now May is almost over, but I still have a few days left to post this response. This month, the question was about yarn: Which yarn do you like most for crochet and why? Which yarn would you like to experiment with? Where do you buy your yarn, and how much to you buy a month?

Now I now this blog parade is focusing mostly on crochet, but honestly, if I only wrote about that, this post would be very short: I'm kind of the opposite of a yarn snob. Over the years I bought what ever was pretty, cheap and easyly avaiable, mostly no name cottons and buttinette's Versaille, a fngering acrylic yarn, in the colors I needed for whatever I was making - which was mostly amigurumi, oven mittens and stuff for dools/stuffed animals where material didn't matter much.

But now, to do a bit of a loop, since I started getting into knitting, I'm focusing more on making actual garmets for people to wear, and suddenly material starts to matter - and more and more I find myself buying yarn for certain projects. And while I have mostly done so for knitting thus far, I'm also getting more into crochet as a by-product as well, so let's talk about what I bought for knitting!

So far, I'm mostly working with sock yarn. I like that it's easy to use, to wash (something that's rooted kinda deep into my brain since my grandma it's always the first thing my grandma looks at when buying yarn or clothes), and how many colour choices there are - hand dyed stuff, but then also colourways as awesome as the Lang Yarn Sock & Lace Luxe I recently bought! But also normal sock yarn can give really awesome effects if used on a larger piece of knitting:

Now what I've used so far was mostly a mix of cotton and arcrylic fibers. What I really want to start doing now is to experiment a bit with what I consider 'luxury' yarns - silk, mohair, alpaca, merino...not as easyly washable, but since I'm doing my own laundry now I can deal with that, and lots more expensive, but I think my income can cope with that now that I'm not a poor student anymore :D 

So far I've bought most of my yarn online at different stores, but I found out about a few awesome-sounding shops in town that I want to check out later this year. I've also got a few pinned down to visit in towns I will be traveling to. As for the amount, buying yarn usually comes in spurts for me...I won't buy anything for months, then I find some awesome new source or patterns or whatever, ideas start flowing into my head and I will buy 10 balls/skeins at once (see first picture above ;) ). So I really can't break it down to what I buy a month, it vastly differs.