Tested in the fire

There's a sermon illustration in this post. For that reason, even though in contains references to craft done with wool, which I wasn’t going to mention, for a little while at least, I’m putting it out there.

The other night I was sitting in my pew at church chatting to a girl who was telling me she’d been to IKEA on the weekend. So I was telling her, as you do when you’re making conversation, that I went out there a while back too, mainly looking for something to store wool in, because it was in bags all about the place. One thing led to another and she then told me she had a whole box of wool taking up space at home, left over from some event once upon a time, and asked if I’d like to have a look through it. Would I ever! She also then invited me over for dinner to do just that, which is a nicer thing than free wool.

So earlier in the week I went over for a lovely dinner and also to rake through this wool box. I didn’t actually have my hopes up so high about the contents, thinking it could be full of lairy acrylic that people didn’t want, and personally I just don’t put the time and effort into making something out of a acrylic. I’m a wool snob. And there was a tonne of acrylic in some kind of neon orangey-red that I was never going to put a hook into in the bottom of the box. But I did come home with quite a stash of quality pure wool, in nice colours, much of it plain natural/cream.

The problem was that there was also some yarn that had lost its label, and I discovered that telling wool from acrylic is not always immediately obvious.

I took some of this questionable material home with me, then yesterday I googled ways to tell the difference. One clue is that acrylic will often have more intense and vivid colours, because of the way the fibres take up colour differently, or will be a lot softer. (Here’s where you’re supposed to start hearing echoes of various parables and New Testament stories, just so you know.) But apparently what you can do to really be sure is set a match to it. Yes, burn it. Wool will apparently smell like burning hair, and acrylic will smell like burning plastic (which is sort of a case of choosing your poison) but also, real wool won’t actually burn, or will go out quickly, singe and turn to ash, whereas acrylic will catch alight, burn, and melt and turn to goop.

I didn’t have a lot of time last night in between work and bible study, but I couldn’t resist lighting a candle and giving this a go. However, I discovered that my nose wasn’t quite up to the smell test, my discernment was limited, and I just got a little overcome with sniffing burning fibres. A second problem here is that some yarn is a blend of wool and acrylic, so you get a little whiff of hair, a little whiff of plastic, a little bit of ash and a little bit of goop (and your flat begins to smell generally like a mix of burning hair and plastic). I don’t know that I’m very theologically sound on this point either, given the whole “faith as small as a mustard seed” thing, and we all know illustrations can only go so far, but the blended yarn tends to get tossed aside with the full-blown acrylic for me. It’s contaminated. And maybe the acrylic would eventually get all those horrid little pilly balls on it and choke and smother the wool ...

I need to have another go at this tonight (and hope I don't burn-test the apartment also), now that I think my testing skills and discernment have been sharpened, but here folks is my real life example of testing by fire, as a means of telling the real thing from the counterfeit (cf 1 Peter 1, 1 Corinthians 3 etc).

I’d already decided, but now I have been kick-started, that I’m going to start making up a pile of woolly, crafty things in my spare time (hah! – we’ll see) so that one day I might have enough for a little market stall somewhere (and for whatever gift-giving occasions arise along the way).