Knitting clubs and donated yarn are my solution, too! Right now I have a big pile of yarn and a half-made blanket sitting on my floor waiting for me to start working on it again, and I paid only for the crochet hook. The women’s center at my university has a crochet/knitting group; we make blankets for foster children and we get a LOT of donated yarn. To be honest, I think the donating-blankets part of it came about mostly because so many of us had run out of family members to present with our crafts projects! We had to do something useful with them, and here were kids who could use something pretty and warm of their own… it works out nicely. And I think it helps us get more donated yarn, since people are much more willing to dig out the stash of yarn they’ve had sitting around forever when they know that the stuff you make out of it will actually be used.

As for yarn, it *is* expensive; I sometimes get lucky and find it in thriftshops.

I always have my crochet with me when I’m in public. I think it hides that my hands like to be up by my chest, or if i have my crochet project in my hands while they’re up by my chest, I look less odd. and it’s fun making stuff. right now i’m doing a doily pattern that i’m going to turn into a snood. i never understood doilies until i realised i could put them on my head. :)

one way that you can get cheaper yarn is to get a sweater at a thrift shop and unravel it, but make sure that the sweater has knitted seams, not sewed seams because if it was machine made they often make a giant square piece of knitted thing and then cut a sweater shape out of it and so if you try to take it apart you jsut get little pieces of yarn because they’re cut so many times. but if it has knitted seams (you can tell because it doesnt have tiny sewing thread sewing them together going zigzag but looks like it could have been done by hand), then you can take it apart and wash the yarn and wrap it up and then have yarn. I did that with a child sized sweater i got at a thrift shop and it made a huge ball of yarn.

When you’re unravelling the sweater, it is good to unravel it around the legs of a chair so that it doesn’t tangle, and then to tie it with scrap yarn in a bunch of places, weaving in and out, to keep it together, and then you can wash it. then you hang it up somewhere to dry and once it’s dry you can put it back on the legs of a chair and take out the ties and then roll it into a ball.

Do you have a ravelry account? you can find lots of patterns on ravelry and look at pretty crochet stuff and you can upload pictures of your stuff and keep track of what yarn you have.

I didn’t know the Raventones were autistic.

Do you like untangling yarn? I do. It is like playing with the yarn and moving fingers almost randomly through the knots and then suddenly it unravels and it is fun to play with.

My favourite texture yarn is a bamboo cotton blend and it is soft without being plasticky or making my hands cringe, sometimes soft is too soft, but it’s just the right amount of soft. it is expensive, though, so usually i end up with acryllic.

I want to suggest that if buying yarn becomes a restrictive expense for you, often knitting clubs (mine meets at the local church) have leftover donated yarn they are happy to share, if you ask.