Confessions of a Nail Biter
February 9, 2009 
As a knitter, one of the most annoying things when knitting is to have delicate yarn snag on one’s rough fingers. Sure, a good scrub will exfoliate all that roughness off or you can always opt to rub some hand cream on.
I, on the other hand, am a nail biter. Actually, I’m a finger biter. It’s a dirty, disgusting habit I’ve had for over 25 years. Now, you’re wondering, “what the hell is finger biting” ? Well, it began as nailbiting, which you may know as the constant gnawing, chewing, and ripping off nails and spitting it out left and right like chewing tobacco. Most nailbiters never need nail clippers because their nails are gnawed down to the quick, occasionally drawing blood. Yes, it’s gross and I’ll admit to doing quite often, especially when nervous. (You had to see my bloody mutilated fingers after taking the SAT exam. Talk about a horror show) Then, one day, I decided I wanted to stop this. I wanted to wear nail polish like other people and I wanted to open soda cans without having to ask for help (this may be one reason why I don’t drink soda) So, the nails are finally intact and I actually have normal looking nails now. EXCEPT…like an addict who shifts from one addiction to another, I now have gone to gnawing on the skin surrounding the nail. The sides of the nail, the tip of the finger and at its worst, the folds of the fingers. This makes for some really rough fingers and a heck of a time trying to knit without having yarn stick all over my fingers. (to understand what kind of state my fingers are in, get this: I was rejected for fingerprinting at the civil hall for IDs three times because I didn’t have fingerprints in 6 of my 10 fingers. I was told to come back when the skin grew back and had fingerprints.) I will spare you a photograph of my fingers because it’s quite gross. (if you peel away three layers of skin on your finger, that’s what it looks like – think, a skinned rabbit)
Now, I’m writing about this because I’m trying to stop and make my fingers normal again. I don’t know why I do it and it’s gotten so bad that I can’t bend some of my fingers. (it hurts too much) Can you believe I was squeezing lime juice the other day with my bare hands? It hurt more than going into labor. The ends of my hair were standing stick straight.
I just can’t seem to stop picking at the hanging pieces of skin. Like an annoying hangnail that you yank and instantly regret doing it, I go on day after day picking at the skin, drawing blood, and yelling at myself for being so gross. Argh!
So here I go again with another resolution:
NO BITING FINGERS! Every time I find myself doing it, I’m giving away a skein of yarn. And if I succeed in getting my fingers to look normal, I’m treating myself to some online yarn buying. (That oughta do the trick!)
Reducing Volume of Yarn Stash
January 30, 2009 
The dilemma for many yarn hoarders (these are the hardcore yarn stashers who have more yarn than their LYS) is mainly space, money, and time. I need not explain the money and time part since I have no idea how to earn more money or to time travel. But the space, I think I can sort of figure out a way to make room in what is now dubbed “my yarn closet.” Witness, my oldest son tredging through my stash like a ball pit at Chuck-E-Cheese.
So I have boxes of yarn up to the ceiling in this hallway closet of mine and there is no way in hell I can get to most of the stuff. Time for some organizing. I bought a bunch of those Rubbermaid and Sterlite bins that are clear (they HAVE to be clear or it’s back to the guessing game again) I dragged out all those cardboard boxes and chucked them all. (ok, I still have three boxes left but that’s cuz I ran out of those plastic bins.) I sorted out the yarns by brand and came to the conclusion that I needed more space. (uh, duh?)
Best way to get rid of yarn – knit faster.
Second best way to get rid of yarn – knit away big, bulky, chunky yarns. The fatter and bigger, the better. These monstrosities come in honking 100g hanks with only 80 or so yards so it can’t take that long. Hello, Rowan Big Wool and Rowan Spray. You suckers are taking up two of my boxes. I don’t care if I look “fluffier” when I wear chunky knits. I just need you out of my yarn closet. So here I am knitting up a long cardigan with Rowan Spray. Boom, 7 skeins gone already. Woo-hoo! Next in line, Rowan Big Wool pullover. Instant gratification aside, I love the emptying out of my boxes. It’s a lovely feeling. Off to knit more poofy looking outfits!
A Moratorium on All Web Purchases
I’m not talking about a yarn diet here. It’s ALL purchases. Sadly, I have come to the one thing that prevents me from buying more yarn: money. Yep, I’m broke. And as I mentioned before, I’d have to kill myself before I incur debt to buy yarn (credit cards don’t count since I always buy what I can pay in time, thus, no interests or other fees accrued)
As I was lifting out boxes after boxes and bags after bags of yarn out of my closet, I thought to myself “HOLY CRAP! I am one step away from becoming a full on hoarder and being broke at the same time”
So, no more purchases at all in the next 6 months (since that’s when my CD matures. Am I glad I didn’t invest in any stocks or stock-based funds? Totally! I so deserved to buy the last $1000 of yarn just for that! Take that mutual funds and 401Ks!)
To show that I’m serious, I’ve left 6 Ravelry groups that pertain to any sort of yarn sales or anything that might even hint at a yarn sale. I’ve not logged into Ebay to watch any items and I’m gonna do my best to keep any spending offline to a minimum. Rough times ahead – ahoy! (Sorry yarn retailers, I forsee some decline in future revenues, seeing I’ll no longer be dropping ridiculous amount of money at your site) No exceptions. I don’t care if you’re selling cashmere for $1 a skein. Nope, not buying it. Baby alpaca for 25 cents? La-la-la, I’m not listening.
Aw, no more posts about my yarn buys? Don’t worry, I still have a good 200 yarns I didn’t mention buying in the last 6 months. Stash diving here I come!
Elann aka How to Blow Through Your Cash Fast
So I’ve been buying a lot of yarn lately (as if I haven’t been buying a lot before) from Elann.com because they’re selling off all the Needful Yarn inventory (and if you didn’t know by now, Needful Yarns Inc went bust) at dirt cheap prices. Every Tuesday morning at 9AM, like clockwork, I find myself staring at the computer screen clicking on my mouse like a madwoman so I could buy the colors I want. It’s like a mad rush of people during Black Friday trying to ram their way into Best Buy or what-have-you.
Considering Needful Yarns had a good 50 or so yarns in their inventory, I don’t think these sales will stop. It’s like a flood of sales. And one can only absorb so much.
I returned from Arizona last week to find 8 boxes (7 of them yarn) sitting in front of my door. Immediately, I had to glance at my husband’s reaction which was one of utter disbelief/wonder sprinkled with a bit of annoyance. I cringed and ferreted the boxes to a corner. I opened them late at night when everyone was asleep so they wouldn’t give me s**t for buying yet more yarn. Three of these boxes were from Elann. I swear to god, I’m paying someone’s mortages.
Buy, Buy, Buy (think N’Sync song)
It’s been a while since I last posted. (you like the new look?) That’s cuz I was busy buying yarn and yarn related items. What can I say, I love buying yarn. (maybe even more than actually knitting. OK, let’s not go there) Whenever I find a great deal and I score the amount I want in a good color, I practically jump up and down. Once I get my package, I play with the skeins if they are single skeins, but most of the time, I just marvel at the yarn inside the mill packaged bags and keep them in there. Many yarns, I have yet to actually feel because they’re still in their original package. But because I have limited resources (although many might consider it infinite), I took to doing something good for my fellow knitters in Korea, while fulfilling my urge to buy discount yarn without spending my own dime. I found some good deals on yarns that are really expensive over there (Rowan Soft Lux and Jaeger Roma, all sold for over $10 in Korea) took orders on behalf of several knitters, and ordered the yarn, promising to send it to them if they’ll pay me for just the yarn and shipping cost. I had a lot of fun with it. It was really nice to just shove all these massive amounts of yarn in my shopping cart without feeling the guilt. And of course they went nuts. Even with the international shipping, each ball of yarn was going to set them back only $3.50 (a total bargain for them) I was getting orders for 50-60 balls of Soft Lux!
B-U-T…(you knew this was coming)…
this too-good-to-be-true deal of $1.49 Soft Lux was at Herrschner’s. If you’ve never heard of them, consider yourself warned. They have some unsavory business practices that I’ve found to range from really annoying to outright infuriating. You might think, ‘Then why the hell would you go back to them?’ For one, some of their deals just can’t be beat. Like this $1.49 Soft Lux for example. That’s INSANELY cheap. And they often throw in free shipping with just $35 purchase. You don’t see that too often these days. (Most online vendors have a $100 minimum to qualify for free shipping. Hells yeah I end up buying $100 or more) And lastly, I signed up for their Savings Club way back when I didn’t know any better (that’s $19.99 upfront and 10% savings on all orders for a full year. Plus a free shipping coupon that I can use whenever without a minimum purchase. I was sold! By the time I had signed up I had already dropped a good $200 from Herrschner’s. By now, I think I got my money’s worth.) Anyway, this Soft Lux deal was a total bust because they kept the sale open without indicating that they were out of stock and when I finally decided to checkout, I got all these red flags saying “Not available” WTF? In the end, I had to call them and ask how many exactly did they have for me to buy. The woman on the line told me there were only 40 of Gigli color left (read: greenish khaki). So I told her to place an order for those 40 (which she begrudgingly did by manually punching it into her computer) and proceeded to tell everyone in Korea that their order would have to be adjusted because the store oversolf/ran out. At this point, I was kinda peeved because it wasn’t my fault that they ran out but I felt really bad having raised their hopes about a yarn they weren’t going to get.
It gets worse. When I get a package from Herrschner’s, it was really small. It couldn’t possibly hold 20 bags of Soft Lux much less 40. I open it and what do I see? No Soft Lux. Just a receipt with a “Backordered until 12/18″ WTF2?
This customer service rep (who I hear is THE go-to woman over there) specifically told me there were 40 and she was the one who manually checked the inventory levels and made the order on my behalf. I couldn’t understand what the Then I get this flimsy piece of mail the other day from Herrschner’s which basically said this – We don’t have it so we won’t send it. Sorry. At this point, I was PISSED. All that for nothing? Do you realize how many freakin hours I spent trying to coordinate this thing so that my knitting buddies over in Korea could get this? How many emails and PMs to check colors and exact number needed for certain projects and actual shipping costs through usps.com and trying to decipher the currency conversion. I almost had a fit.
However, the rational side of me (not when I’m yarn shopping though) kicked in and I decided not to grill the CSR for taking a bad order. She just did her job and her computer lied to her. It wasn’t exactly her fault. Who to blame but my poor self for believing Herrschner’s? I wrote each and every one of the Korean knitters and apologized for the way things turned out. Everyone was really civil about it but I had a feeling a few of them were peeved because they had told THEIR friends about what a great deal was to be had and their friends then went on to order the yarn. It was one giant ugly mess. I had to do damage control so I sent out a round of emails telling them about Smiley’s Jaeger Roma (that baby has been out there for $1.99 for almost a full year now. I KNOW they had these in stock.) Some took the deal, others didn’t (probably because they were so put off by the first fiasco). I actually absorbed the shipping cost in the US. $12.95. (and thus I just HAD to order some extra yarn for myself if I was going to pay that much for shipping) Racked up something like $350 and promptly got a letter from Smiley’s saying they would be sending the order in two separate boxes because it was so big. I kind of had to laugh at that. The last time something like that happened was when I first discovered Little Knits and went totally nuts (remember this was when my stash was still manageable)
In the end, everything worked out pretty well and I learned a valuable lesson: take Herrschner’s with a grain of salt and NEVER order anything on someone else’s behalf from them.
The horror that is Taiga Yarns
November 13, 2008
Filed under knitting/yarn
Tags: camel wool, goat's down, taiga yarns
Recent Update: I ended up keeping the camel wool yarn because someone told me it felts really well. I figured it couldn’t hurt to try. As for the goat’s down, I went back to the sample swatch to examine the yarn one more time and I’m beginning to suspect that the goat’s down wasn’t dehaired. If all these prickly hairs were gone, the underlying fiber is quite soft.(I would almost say it’s quite cashmere like) It’s a damn shame. I returned the goat’s down yarn. We shall see how my refund goes.
Oh, where do I begin.
Someone on Ravelry had posted that a site called TAIGA YARNS was having a 50% off everything sale. Intrigued, I decided to checkout some of the yarns they were offering since I’ve never heard of them before. Turns out, it is a Russian yarn company (Troisk Wools) that’s been around for over 150 years. Russian yarns, you say? Yeah, not familiar with that part of the world. But, what caught my eye was the words “camel wool” and “goat’s down” I’ve read that camel is quite soft and goat’s down, I assumed was something similar to cashmere. So despite the really high minimum purchase ($100 or more to get discount) I got a bunch of the goat’s down, camel wool, camel-acrylic blend and merino wool yarn.
2 weeks (and a few days) passes. No show. I e-mail and receive a reply saying they’ll ship it out tomorrow. What the heck? Anyway, I received it yesterday morning and when I opened it, there were all these yarns with Russian and no English. Hmmm….No biggie. I opened the goat’s down bag and am horrified by what to me looks like spun pubic hair. There were literally 2 inch long coarse black hairs sticking out left and right out of this supposed goat’s down (looked to me like goat’s fur which is really really scratchy). I swatched it and washed it hoping it would soften up. Nope. It was just as if not more scratchy/itchy and I coudn’t fathom where and how I could possibly use this yarn. Returning it was my only solution (I hate doing this cuz I’m paying for shipping both ways but I just can’t stand this yarn).
Oh, the camels aren’t much better. They’re very rough and the yarn label actually says “100% wool” No mention of camel anywhere. But after confirmation from the company that it was indeed camel, I had to feel it again. Rough. I had misunderstood about camel yarns. It was camel DOWN that I was thinking of, not camel wool. Even the acrylic blend was rough. I’m returning the entire lot (minus the one skein of goat’s down i used to swatch and the merino wools which are quite lovely)
A learning experience for me – never buy yarns I don’t know anything about and never buy goat’s down or camel wool. Ugh!
Happy birthday to myself!
Yes, that’s right. I’m 30. And rather than sulking the end of my glorious(?) twenties, I did what any good knitter does when given a nice fat check as a present – buy more yarn! I’ve been holding out on ordering from Little Knits for awhile because they changed the free shipping to split shipping but it seems the minimum order has just increased from $125 to $150. No biggie. Another extra bag of yarn in my cart.
I had initially wanted to order the Merino Brights by Elle but after having seen the finished projects on Ravelry, I wasn’t too keen on the “messy” look of the varigated colors. Plus, I had a sneaking suspicion it wasn’t as soft as I had originally assumed. So, I bought a bunch of OnLine Supersocke yarns instead. I’ve never knit a sock with actual fingering weight sock yarn so that was a category of yarn I was lacking in. (Lacking, meaning less than 10 skeins of it. Come to think of it, I might have 12 in my stash…hmmm)
And Herrschner’s had a big bag sale with mostly crap yarn but there was a real gem in the mix : a 6 pack bag of Moda Dea Washable Wool. Despite the not-so-appealing name of the yarn, this is some awesome stuff (soft as butter, machine washable and easily accessible at any big box craft store). I can’t believe it’s not more popular. Anyway, I had bought 11 of these from Herrschner’s for $3.97 a skein and now it’s on sale for a third of that. I hate it when this happens. I’m usually really good about finding great deals but looking at my sales receipt from when I first started accumulating my yarn stash, I couldn’t believe how much money I spent on some not so great yarn. (Nashua Painted Forest? Debbie Bliss Soho? Hmmm……)
Anywho, happy birthday to myself. Hurray!
I’m broke. Can’t buy more yarn even if I want to
I proclaimed a few yarn diets here and there but I guess it’s that time. No more money left. (Ok, so my checking account doesn’t read $0.00 but I got to draw the line somewhere, right?)
Having said that, I’m awaiting 5 boxes this coming week. Oh, almost forgot about 1. OK 6 packages. Holy crap, I bought a lot. I went on a spending spree without realizing. It’s hard to realize that when everyone else is riling you on. (hello, yarn sale groups on Ravelry!) But, I can’t go and blame others for my crazy purchases. That was all me. And my hubby is starting to get annoyed. He happened to pick up the box of yarn that had arrived before I got to it and he practically snarled, “MORE yarn? When are you going to stop buying? Enough already.” Oops. I was sort of hoping he wouldn’t notice. (How can you not? OUr hallway closet is now officially my yarn closet and all contents of that said closet including the vacuum cleaners and various niknaks have been relegated to the laundry room.)
One of these days, I’m gonna find myself opening up a yarn shop.
Adventures in Food-Based Dyes
October 12, 2008
Filed under knitting/yarn
Tags: food based dyes, stain dyeing, yarn dyeing
So there are probably a gazillion people who dye their own yarn. (ok, more like hundreds)
B-U-T, how many can claim to be all natural? And I don’t mean meddar root, indigo, or some sort of weird plant concoction that sounds like something straight out of a witches’ brew. I mean, all edible-natural.
Ha! I shall call this stain-dyeing since it’s technically not really dyeing but more of a staining technique. I sat down and thought about all the crap that stain my white shirts and won’t come out even with the liberal sprinklings of Oxyclean. Grape juice, wine, grass stains, blood, fruits of various colors, etc. Having scoured the web for info on how to get these stains to set, I went to the spice section of my local grocery store and armed myself with alum and cream of tartar (seems to make colors more prominent)
So far, I’ve dyed with wine+grape juice, tomato leaves, and cactus pear. Next on my list is turmeric (as in curry powder) and coffee. I’m trying to think if there are other food sources. Beets and carrots maybe? I’m thinking kimchi. That stuff never comes off my cutting boards. But the smell!!!!
Everybody wants a cardigan now
Hello, I’m Yarnphreak and I suck at knitting. There, I said it. From gleaning my posts, I might sound like I know a lot about knitting or have knit a lot of projects. In reality, I spent about 4 years on and off knitting nothing but square/rectangular stockinettes. (yes, I can knit stockinette stitches like a machine. I’ve gotten several compliments on how even my stitches look. BRAG!!!) I didn’t even know how to make increases until a few months ago and I knit my very first sleeves in August. You can stop laughing now.
Anyway, now that I have collected enough yarn to start my own yarn shop, I feel the pressure to use up all or at least a partial portion of that. (My husband casually pointing out that so many boxes of yarn arrive at our doorstep but nothing ever seems to get made. Ack, you got me!) So I have been knitting at a much faster pace and am actually THIS close to finishing several projects. All the naysayers (namely my family) who just made fun of my yarn stash now all want a piece of the action. “Make me this” and ”Make me that” And all these specifications! No bright colors, no cables, low collar, no zipper, yada yada yada. What am I, some custom tailor-knitter? People, I barely finished one sweater. Don’t all of you jump on the wagon at once!
