Shop Update

Howdy, knitters and crocheters! If you haven’t swung by our website recently, you’re probably surprised to see the notice banner at the top of the page. We’ve talked about this a lot on Instagram recently and also mentioned it in the new Covid19 News section on the front page of our site, but we thought it was probably time to write a post about it.

In March, Megan-Anne and I had to make the hard choice to stop dying yarn until the glove and face mask scarcity has ended. We don’t want to be part of the problem and contribute to there not being enough for hospitals. We us glove and masks as a part of our process, especially when mixing dyes, and we had the misfortune to run out right as the pandemic hit the USA. We stopped letting customers dye-to-order yarn, and what we had in stock was what we had. Until one fateful day!

I could have sworn we had a couple boxes of gloves somewhere. They had given me a rash so I had tossed them aside to use in a worst case scenario. Not being able to dye yarn at all anymore definitely fit that bill, so we tore apart the studio looking for them. At one point, Megan-Anne suggested we go through the dreaded storage unit.

A little backstory, back in January of 2018 when a crazy ice storm swept through Philly, a pipe froze and burst in our studio a week before we were supposed to pack up and head to New York City for Vogue Knitting Live. It was a dark time for us. A lot of stuff got destroyed. Our insurance didn’t cover everything. We still went to VK Live, but we were depressed and miserable the whole time. In hindsight, we should have cancelled. Anyway, in order to clean up the studio, we moved everything into the storage unit, but not everything made it back out again. We left our show set-up stuff in there along with show-exclusive yarn, and we decided that we’d deal with it when we were in the right emotional place to go there. I even jokingly wrote on the boxes, “Do not open until 2020.”

Yes, this is suddenly an origin story about how I discovered my powers as a clairvoyant. You’re welcome.

Well, color us surprised when we ran into them while searching for gloves and masks! It was the laugh that we needed. We never did find those gloves I was allergic to, but finding two huge boxes of yarn was pretty fantastic. Thanks, Past Me!

It took us a while to sort through the loose mini-skeins of Vacation Yarn, count them, and organize them into mini-skein sets. Megan-Anne and her stir-crazy toddler, Mabel the Merciless, turned it into a fun homeschooling moment.

It definitely was not child labor.

The beholder Xanathar—Waterdeep’s most infamous crime lord—is known to hoard yarn. The beholder catalogs colorways and ponders yarn content. Its twisted mind imagines that it can knit everything!⁠ This Mini Vacation Yarn Set comes with five 20 gram skeins of Vacation, a fingering weight yarn.⁠

While the Llamas tackled the minis, I – the latte – sorted through the Masquerade Yarn. I was happy to discover that there are sweater quantities of many of the colorways, including but not limited to: Bad Wolf, Doctor Donna, Office X-Mas Party, Witches Brew, Hobbiton, and Hand Turkey. Masquerade was locally spun in Pennsylvania and contains 80% Bluefaced Leicester wool and 20% silk. It was a base Megan-Anne wanted just for shows. We had it on the website briefly years ago, but she wanted it to be special for people who came to see us in person so I took it down. Well, it’s back up now and with more colorways than before!

To be honest, I don’t even remember dying some of these colors, and most of the skeins didn’t have labels. I can’t find the recipes for some of them either. I mean, it kinda makes sense. We used to try out new colorway ideas on it all the time, but I do feel as if we mildly played ourselves. This is what happens when I don’t tag stuff because I “totally know my own work.” Ha! But it was fun to get to name some of the colorways based on my new obsession, Animal Crossing: New Horizons.

Counting, naming, and photographing the yarn probably would’ve gone a lot faster if I hadn’t been obsessed with finding all of the Cherry Blossom recipes in Animal Crossing, and I kept getting distracted by matching up skeins into pretty combos. I’m not going to lie, I definitely ended up setting aside one of those combos for myself. See pic below.

Long story short, even though we’ve had to stop dying yarn for now and what we have in stock is what we have, we were able to add some exciting stuff to the shop. We appreciate your patronage through these difficult times, so we put a bunch of yarn on sale and also extended the “choose your own discount” on all the patterns in our Ravelry store to May 31st. You can read more about it HERE, but here’s the gist. We want you to stay home and knit through the quarantine. Please choose the discount that best matches your financial situation:

• To receive 25% off your L&L Ravelry pattern purchase use the code: DISTANCE25
• To receive 50% off your L&L Ravelry pattern purchase use the code: DISTANCE50
• To receive 75% off your L&L Ravelry pattern purchase use the code: DISTANCE75

Also, this is on the front page of our site, but it bares repeating. If an item isn’t in stock, our system automatically removes it from the storefront. When we are able to start dying yarn again and can replenish our stock, the items will appear back in the store. So, don’t panic about the supply of Geek-A-Long Yarn being limited. We’ll let you know the moment we’re able to dye more. Additionally, orders may take up to a week to ship. As long as we are permitted, we will only be shipping orders once a week since we have to schedule pick-ups with the USPS now.

Stay home, stay safe, and knit on!

~Jac

Sometimes I fantasize about doing normal things, like packing my trunk with orders and dropping them off at the post office on my way home from the studio. I even miss that one surly guy at the loading dock who always gave me side-eye.