In 1969 we bought our first house. It's a nice enough house but at the time it had a very bare backyard. So my wife decided that bamboo would be a good, quick solution to adding some greenery and privacy to the area.

Bamboo can be pretty fast growing but it also tends to pop up all over the place, sometimes in unexpected places. Like this sock yarn that I bought yesterday at Unwind.

I made my first bamboo piece about three years ago with some of Southwest Trading's bamboo. I forget what it was called. Then there wasn't any bamboo for a while. All of a sudden, quite unexpectedly, there's bamboo everywhere. Skein has bamboo yarn from at least three different vendors. I made a shrug earlier this year using Plymouth's Royal Bamboo. Very nice. But this is the first I've seen of bamboo in sock yarn. It's 45% bamboo, 40% wool, and 15% nylon. At $9.25 per 50 gram skein it's a good deal. I don't know how long I can wait to try this out.

I saw some yarn a couple of weeks ago that was made from corn. I haven't seen it in stores yet but it also looks interesting. What next?