the mink yarn that wasn’t….
There’s been a big fuss over Lotus Mimi, a supposedly 100% mink yarn. Now, I say supposedly because no one is certain if it did contain mink in the first place. All we know is that the yarn was sent out for testing at a lab and it came back as a mix of angora, wool, and nylon. ZERO mink.
Well, how about that. Trendsetter, the U.S. distributor of the yarn was quick to pull the plug on this fake yarn and is doing a massive recall on the product. Lotus Yarns of China, which originally sold the yarn is claiming that they were duped by the actual manufacturer of the yarn and had no knowledge of the fiber content switcheroo. Supposedly, Lotus had test results and documents to prove the yarn was indeed mink back in the day when Trendsetter first contacted Lotus to distribute the yarn and the brand in the U.S.
Who knows what the truth is? Somebody is lying and lots of people are pissed and rightly so. $26/50g ball of a mostly wool-nylon blend yarn? And what about the angora content? A lot of folks are allergic to angora so this is really bad form on the part of the Chinese. In the past, I’ve defended Chinese yarns despite China’s poor reputation for knock-offs of everything under the sun because I figured, who would go out of their way to make fake yarn? (I mean, yes there are fake cashmeres on Ebay going for $2/ball but c’mon, unless you’re stupid, you know that’s not real cashmere, right? I hate those people who buy these ridiculously priced yarns and complain that they turned out to be not cashmere but nylon or microfiber. Uh-duh!)
Well, you got me China. You and your minks….which by the way are most likely sable. (and no, not the ‘Stash Accumulation Beyond Life Expectency’ kind)
Sable is commonly found in Northern parts of Asia with the lowest quality (cheapest) grown in China. The Chinese character most often used to sell “mink” yarns is ‘貂
Anyway, from Ravelry posts like this that are pointing out the mink yarns don’t look quite right under the microscope as well as speculation that the yarn is a kill fiber (supposedly, the mink are brushed but how one would go about doing that without hurting the animal and not accruing a ridiculously high labor cost is beyond me) I’m going mink free from now on.
What’s even weirder is that Craig Turner of minkyarn.com, a purveyvor of mink and mink blend yarns suddenly announced he was leaving the mink yarn business and going the route of Italian mills……and then suddenly deleting his blog post. Did he find out something we’d rather not know? Who the hell knows? But this “Minkgate” sure is fishy.
As much as I like exotic fibers, I don’t approve of killing animals just to get yarn (with the exception of NZ possums because they’re an ecological problem) and I don’t like having to second guess if what I have is real or fake.
That said, there have been other instances of fake yarn in the past. Let me briefly mention some of them:
Yarnphreakshow 
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