there is an email in your inbox with a subject line that reads:

Yarn bonanza

Then, when you click on the email to read it, you find an invitation to come to someone’s house, climb up into her attic, and take some fiber off of her hands. The only catch — you need to get there sometime in the next seven days before she moves.

Fortunately for me, when I was setting my intentions for the new year, the intentions centered on finishing projects in medias res and did not cover yarn or yarn acquisitions, so when an email, much like the one described in the above scenario, arrived in my inbox through the magic of forwarding, I was able accept the offer without having to revise my intentions for 2013.

After contacting the woman who had generated the email, I set up a time to go to her house.

I didn’t quite know what to bring with me.

What do you take to the house of someone you know because you have an invitation to come take things out of her attic because you have what is known in Facebook world as “1 mutual friend”?

I brought an empty cardboard box and some would-be yarn bags. In the end, however, I needed nothing.

After a brief but cordial introduction, my hostess and I ascended into the attic where an array of yarns that would rival any yarn store’s selection awaited. In the dim light of the attic, I did not always have an exact sense of the color I was choosing.

But after nearly an hour-and-a-half of sorting through the various bins and boxes, we descended from the attic, loaded my car with the yarn and fiber swag, and I headed for home.

When I arrived, I unpacked the car:

and then spent another hour unpacking the boxes.

Here is a visual tour of some of my new fiber holdings.

Roving of indeterminate fiber:

cotton, that has not been through a cotton gin (or the modern equivalent):

another interesting bit of fiber:

selvedge strips:

more selvedge strips:

cones of yarn to keep the squirrels on my back deck busy:

and an overview of everything else:

I don’t really know how to thank the woman who invited me into her home and gave me this yarn, but I will do my best to honor her generosity by making things that somehow encompass and reflect the spirit in which the yarn was given to me.