Thursday, March 31, 2011

Arigato, Temple Sale.

Here are some skeins of yarn from Japan.  When I visited my sister there, back in the 90's, we stumbled on to a temple rummage sale in the plaza, next to the train station.  I spent a grand total of 1700 yen, and had enough chachkes and dessert and saki sets that I did not need to buy any other souvenirs.  It cost me 35$ to UPS my loot home.
I bought a bag of these cute little 25 gm skeins of yarn at the temple sale.
Today, in yet another futile attempt to find something lost in the stash, they surfaced.  My first question was, what  are they: acrylic?  Wool?  My second question was: how am I going to find out?
Well, the answer is Google translate.  I know what you are thinking.  Sure, that works fine if you can write Japanese. Well, I can't.  So I had to enter likely English words and see what the Japanese translation looked like.
So, the first skein is 45% acrylic, 35% wool, and 20% nylon.  The middle one is 60% acrylic, 40% cotton, and the brown stuff is 55% acrylic, 45% ????  I tried every fiber ingredient I could think of, and didn't get a match for the brown.  The little symbols show wash water at 30 degrees C. and there's no X through the little symbol for the iron.  Whatever it is, I can wash it.
I have 100 gm. of the first kind, and 50 gm each of the other two.  All three are 2 ply, and about half the size of 4 ply sock yarn.  So, perfect for the knitting machine!

2 comments:

Russell Sprout said...

Next time, email your Japanese speaking niece!

sharonwue said...

just translate the label for me, okay?