Fingering Yarn

For anyone who happens to be a trivia addict, here’s a goodie for you.

For years there were two weights of yarn available for use when knitting baby garments: baby yarn and fingering yarn.  Fingering was the skinnier of the two.

Recently I went shopping for fingering yarn in response to a request for a pair of hand-knit bootees for one of our granddaughters.  Two out of two stores didn’t carry it, and when I asked clerks in both places they gave me the deer-in-the-headlights look, like what in the world am I talking about?  I gave them the dazed-bozo look right back, like why in the world don’t you know the answer?  Then I felt guilty, smiled, and thanked them anyway.

I could have hit these clueless non-knitters with my manifesto – how I grew up with a mother who knit constantly, made up knitted garments without patterns, always took a knitting project with her in the car, and gave private knitting lessons in our home.  Surely they should know I wasn’t making up the existence of fingering yarn.  I was, after all, not born yesterday (obviously), and was not the type to lie.

Finally, today I went shopping again and found I’d been dealing with a semantic, as well as availability, issue.  I guess most mainstream stores (like Meijer and Wal-Mart, my earlier stops) only carry baby yarn – but now there’s a more politically-correct-sounding smaller yarn carried only by specialty knitting and craft shops, baby sport yarn.  It seems to be about the same weight as the old fingering yarn.  So today I bought myself a skein, and tonight am happily occupied with my tiny number 2 needles and the same tattered, yellowed, hand-typed pattern my mother used when she made bootees for my own kids. 

Some things, like the archaic bootee pattern, don’t change.  And even though marketing has made a shift, I’ll probably continue to call baby sport yarn by its old less-sophisticated-sounding name.  Not only do I have emotional attachment to  fingering yarn, but also it’s the principle of the thing – or else I’m an old dog refusing a new trick.