Why I Love Cones

Wonderfully elegant with any amount of yarn on them, coned yarn stole my heart from day one, and after that I could never turn back. Even skeins and balls from my old stash have now been wound up onto cones, rows of which line the shelves in my house, huddle together in baskets, sit patiently in each of my different purses.

Never tangling, never deceiving about their remaining yardage, the precision of a tightly wound cone lets me marvel at my yarn in both its original form as well as whatever is flying off of it onto my needles, as it sits patiently at my feet with the grace and stolidness that a skein could never pull off.

And one of my favorite parts--so handy to tape little notes inside of, whether it's notes about fiber content, yardage, or the next few steps of a pattern so that I don't have to lug a big book or even a soon-to-get-crumpled photocopy around with me for my day...

On another note, some wonderfully soft chenille has come in over the past week--both the variegated shorthair varieties as well as some lustrous, long eyelash yarn, prompting some recent additions to the premade cone supply.

In The Midnight Kitchen

There's something peaceful about being in the store at night, with the machine just winding, winding, winding with beautiful precision. There's been a lot of that lately, with a bunch of recent new batches of fibers that have just come in! Unexpectedly, they arrived before their shelves did, so for now they are still waiting in the wings and being wound onto their shelf-sized cones in the after-hours, hoping to be out and ready to be made into yarn by this weekend.

And, just in case any of you were worried...we got more cones. 1600 of them, to be exact.

How Much Yarn Do I Need??

Understandably, one of the most common questions people have when starting to think about their yarn in terms of pounds is, "How much yarn will I need?" 

Although half a pound is usually plenty for most small and medium-sized projects, often you'll go into a yarn store with a specific project in mind, and you certainly don't want to find out weeks or months down the road that you don't have enough yarn to finish it!

Often I'll encourage people to use the knitted clothes we have for sale as a starting point--throw a cardigan on the scale and see how much it weighs, but take into account that you'll be using heavier yarn...this is a way to approximate how much you'll need for your project, and you may want to throw on a couple extra ounces for good measure.

However, I have just acquired a new tool which has rocked my world:

McMorran Yarn Balance

Dinky as it may look, this yarn balance takes "yards per pound" to a whole new level. On each of the cones that you can choose from on the shelves, you'll find a label that tells you how many yards per pound that single strand is. 

While this may not seem helpful on its own (the wonderment of getting 9,000 yards out of a pound of yarn is quickly offset by realizing you'd probably have to be knitting on sewing needles to make anything out of yarn this thin), the reason those labels are there are to help gauge how thick your yarn will be in the end.

If you combine, for example, six strands of that yarn: you'll reach a pound six times as fast, and subsequently will only get one-sixth as many yards out of a pound of this combined yarn. 

 9,000 divided by 6 = 1,500, so your six-ply yarn will come out to be about 1500 yards per pound, which is in the sport weight range.

This may sound daunting to the math-averse, which is why I'm stoked to have this new tool in the shop to help out for those of you who are more into the hands-on approach. 

Now you can pick out a few strands you'd like to see together, use the yarn balance to figure out how many yards per pound your combined yarn will be (the only calculation you'll need to do is multiplying the length of the sample by 100), and from there you can add or remove strands as necessary to achieve the desired weight you're going for.

Okay, so how does this relate to how many pounds I need? Right. So let's say that instead of knowing that you'd typically buy 150 grams of yarn for a given project, all you know is that you need about 500 yards. Well, if we know the yarn you created is about 1500 yards per pound, but you only want 500 yards of it, then that would be a third of a pound, or about 5.5 ounces.

So bring your ideas, bring your patterns, and we'll figure it out!

Opening Weekend

As of this past Saturday, Yarnia is now officially open! A big thanks to everybody who came out this weekend for the grand opening--you kept the place packed all day long! Also a big thanks to all the well-wishing emails and comments on the blog. Even if I'm not able to respond to all of them, I do read each and every one of them and appreciate all the support.

Saturday was so busy that I didn't get a chance to take any pictures of the scene, but here are a few from the night before, when everything was all set and ready to go...


Display of hand-knitted clothing, hopefully soon to include others' work on consignment!

Some premade cones, to buy or to inspire!

Despite how busy we were on Saturday, we had a couple days to breathe and restock and are looking forward to a busy week!