Ho-ho-hooooooly yarn crack!
Pity the poor UPS guy who delivered the box my sisters sent me this past week.
Here's the story: My sister Toni has a friend who's a weaver. This summer, said friend embarked on a cross-country move and decided to divest herself of ... stuff. And in the process gave Toni (a) a nice little table loom and (b) her entire yarn stash. Which came to Toni in black plastic garbage bags.
Toni's craft is quilting; she's mildly interested in learning to weave, but doesn't knit or crochet. She does, however, have two sisters who do.
So she sorted through the yarn, pulled out some that she liked, and then packed up the rest and drove it to Sacramento, where our other siblings (Martha and Christopher) live. And had Martha help her divide the haul in two: Half for her, half for me.
Thus it was that I came home on Thursday to find a *huge* box on the porch, stuffed to bursting with bags full of yarn. Lots of yarn. As in, enough to fill an 18 gallon Sterilite storage tub with some leftover.
Much of it's on cones, the way it comes from the woolen mill. Most of it's lace- to DK-weight (Martha is not a lace-knitter, and she has yet to make herself a sweater, so I urged her to keep most of the heavier stuff). And from the colors and the labels on the skeined yarn, I'm guessing most of it is at least several years old.
Here's what I got:
If you click through to Flickr, the image has notes tentatively identifying some of the yarn.
Here, have some closeups:
JaggerSpun Zephyr, one of my favorite wool-silk lace yarns. The colors kind of scream "vintage", but there's enough for several shawls, and if they turn out too lurid for my tastes, they could be overdyed.
Two big cones labeles "100 percent rayon flake." I'll have to swatch this and see if it knits up as lurid as it looks.
This is nicer: A thick-thin cotton-linen blend. One big cone; might be suitable for a lightweight summer top.
Love this nubbly silk yarn, but there's not enough of it to do much more than a scarf.
I got more of this than anything else - one enormous cone and a good-sized ball. No content label, but it's a very soft boucle-type yarn, probably DK or fingering weight, and I suspect it would knit up to something like a terrycloth texture. Definite light sweater material.
There were also a few balls of novelty yarns and partial skeins of sock yarn, which will get packaged up soon and sent off to a couple of people who can use them (kalmn and txanne, expect small packages soon). The mustardy-yellow-green stuff is all pure wool, so useful for small felting projects even if the colors aren't my cup of tea.
I'm always a little leery of bringing second-hand yarn into the house because of the possibility that it might harbor yarn-eating critters or their eggs. Normally it gets bagged and stuck in the freezer for a week or two to kill off anything that might infest my woolens. This is a bit much even for my basement freezer, so I'm taking advantage of the current coldsnap; the yarn's been sealed tightly in its plastic bin and set out on the back porch to let mother nature freeze it for me.
The irony here is that I spent this past year knitting through my stash. And now it's bigger than it ever was. By 18 freakin' gallons of yarn.
Here's the story: My sister Toni has a friend who's a weaver. This summer, said friend embarked on a cross-country move and decided to divest herself of ... stuff. And in the process gave Toni (a) a nice little table loom and (b) her entire yarn stash. Which came to Toni in black plastic garbage bags.
Toni's craft is quilting; she's mildly interested in learning to weave, but doesn't knit or crochet. She does, however, have two sisters who do.
So she sorted through the yarn, pulled out some that she liked, and then packed up the rest and drove it to Sacramento, where our other siblings (Martha and Christopher) live. And had Martha help her divide the haul in two: Half for her, half for me.
Thus it was that I came home on Thursday to find a *huge* box on the porch, stuffed to bursting with bags full of yarn. Lots of yarn. As in, enough to fill an 18 gallon Sterilite storage tub with some leftover.
Much of it's on cones, the way it comes from the woolen mill. Most of it's lace- to DK-weight (Martha is not a lace-knitter, and she has yet to make herself a sweater, so I urged her to keep most of the heavier stuff). And from the colors and the labels on the skeined yarn, I'm guessing most of it is at least several years old.
Here's what I got:
If you click through to Flickr, the image has notes tentatively identifying some of the yarn.
Here, have some closeups:
JaggerSpun Zephyr, one of my favorite wool-silk lace yarns. The colors kind of scream "vintage", but there's enough for several shawls, and if they turn out too lurid for my tastes, they could be overdyed.
Two big cones labeles "100 percent rayon flake." I'll have to swatch this and see if it knits up as lurid as it looks.
This is nicer: A thick-thin cotton-linen blend. One big cone; might be suitable for a lightweight summer top.
Love this nubbly silk yarn, but there's not enough of it to do much more than a scarf.
I got more of this than anything else - one enormous cone and a good-sized ball. No content label, but it's a very soft boucle-type yarn, probably DK or fingering weight, and I suspect it would knit up to something like a terrycloth texture. Definite light sweater material.
There were also a few balls of novelty yarns and partial skeins of sock yarn, which will get packaged up soon and sent off to a couple of people who can use them (kalmn and txanne, expect small packages soon). The mustardy-yellow-green stuff is all pure wool, so useful for small felting projects even if the colors aren't my cup of tea.
I'm always a little leery of bringing second-hand yarn into the house because of the possibility that it might harbor yarn-eating critters or their eggs. Normally it gets bagged and stuck in the freezer for a week or two to kill off anything that might infest my woolens. This is a bit much even for my basement freezer, so I'm taking advantage of the current coldsnap; the yarn's been sealed tightly in its plastic bin and set out on the back porch to let mother nature freeze it for me.
The irony here is that I spent this past year knitting through my stash. And now it's bigger than it ever was. By 18 freakin' gallons of yarn.