Miscellaneous Notes

I'm revising my chapter right now (what? can't you tell?), but I had to just stop by for a few quick notes:

1. and most important: Go buy candles from Wendy's Dame Candle Company for everybody on your christmas list. Seriously. These are amazing, wonderful candles. I love mine to death, and even though I can't afford to buy them up like mad like I really want to right now, I at least want to know that Wendy will still be in business whenever I do have a little cash to put in that direction. I should say that I don't actually know Wendy - I "met" her because I bought her candles, thanks to Brenda Dayne's review of them on Cast-On, and I so LOVE the candles that I've been reading Wendy's cool blog since then. And now she says her little home-made company is in danger of folding. Don't let it happen!! For one thing, Wendy's candles are an *awesome* holiday gift idea.

Seriously - Lime & Violet were talking about how wonderful it would be to put the money we all spend this time of year into the hands of small-scale craftspeople instead of big, swindling corporations and I am SO in favor of this. I don't know about you, but I feel like I'm getting swindled left, right and center everywhere I turn, and I haven't purchased a product of quality of any kind from a large company in at least five years. And remember when there used to be this thing called customer service? Hubbster was a pension law lawyer before quitting for grad school, and let me tell you, the money we give these companies is NOT going to anybody who does real work. Meanwhile, thanks to online etsy shops and cafepress and so on, individual people -- people with passion and an actual work ethic and no CEOs to keep in luxurious elegance at the expense of the benefits and pensions owed to the people who actually work -- are now able to sell on their own, directly to consumers, without sacrificing our convenience. The problem is, they have to be able to get the word out, and consumers have to remember they're out there, instead of falling back lazily on the familiar (I admit I'm all too often guilty of this; I'm reminding myself, too). So let's buy candles from Wendy (a great choice for the migraine-sufferer in your life - trust me, these are the only scented candles that won't hurt them), and also check out Lime & Violet's awesome list of etsy shops that sell things for the fiber enthusiast...yessiree bob, that's a list for you to hand out to your friends and family so they can finally stop giving you machine-made GAP scarves (barf) and give you want you really want instead - the fiber to spin and knit your own damn scarf from scratch!

2. Beth (who also happens to own a wonderful little spinning store now, did you know?) asked that we pass around a link to this guy, who's doing a project for an MLA conference on memes. Link to him, and then ping here. (You don't have to know what "ping" means to ping - you just click, and go away feeling you've done a good deed). He's trying to show that we do read each other's blogs and get inspired to pass things on, and to demonstrate at what speed this might happen. Cool. I think it'd be even cooler if, through the same process, we could all help Wendy save her company.

3. Thanks to all my New Yorker buddies for the scoop on the Smiley's and P&S sales! After much deliberation, I decided to resist Smiley's, because they weren't selling the two things I actually needed, and I have absolutely no faith in my ability to go and not buy something else. None. I did go to P&S, and did succeed in buying only what I needed there - some navy Kroy for finishing off Hubbster's peacock socks, and a few skeins more of Paton's Classic Wool because the Galeskas moccasins that I'm making for my father-in-law just don't look right, and since I'm not felting them until we get there at xmas, I want to have the yarn with me to quickly whip up a pair of clogs instead, if the moccasins turn out to be a disaster (I could only find one person online who had knit the moccasins before, and she didn't mention any kind of problem, and I know I've followed the instructions correctly, but it still looks to me like after it felts the toe area will be very short - I can't see how toes are supposed to fit in there after shrinking. Should be a suspenseful felting experience). I had to wait about 45 mins in line for this purchase, and managed not to buy anything else largely because the yarn was only 10% off, which to my mind hardly counts as a sale. So, I got what I knew I had to have in case it wasn't available later, and I'll see whether I feel up to going back again in about a week to see if anything's left by the time the discount is much lower. If anybody goes over the weekend or early next week, I'd be very interested to hear the state of things. As it was, I made the trip count by also doing my grocery shopping at Trader Joe's while I was down there. And I have to say that I was even disappointed (slightly) in them-- and TJ's was really my last great hope for a company that I didn't hate. On my last two trips, I've come home with two items from produce that were already rotten (I couldn't see inside the packaging) and a package of "mushroom turnovers" turned out to be...empty turnovers. Seriously, half of them had nothing in them at all. I'm just completely disgusted by the apparent national, if not global, extinction of competence. Except in a few small corners of the world...the places where people knit, and spin, and make candles, and do it so incredibly well that the mind boggles. Thank god for those people - that is, for all of you! That's my thanks-giving, anyway (as opposed to the holiday, on which we grumbled through some needlessly high-pressure grocery shopping, then over-ate, then fell asleep - no great shakes, if you ask me, and not a good reason to feel thankful only once a year).

4. It's December already. AIEEEEE!! Chapter should have been done yesterday. Crap.

Yarn Market continued

Things have been busy lately (yes, got started on the new chapter for real, and no, no book contract that will make me a millionaire - if ONLY), and I'm afraid there's no knitting news to report since last time. However, I am about to go to New Hampshire for a long weekend, and I'm hoping that will mean lots of good knitting time, and an exciting blog when I get back.

In other news, there are just a few more things I want to add to my previous "Yarn Market" post and in response to some of the comments (and thanks guys, as always, for the wonderful comments!).

First, I should probably say that I come to this issue with some assumptions of my own devising which would probably be worth stating outright: namely, I think that in the same way that democratic government doesn't work unless citizens choose, individually, not just to vote but to keep themselves informed enough to make rational decisions about their own interests and the greater good, I also believe that capitalist economies don't work without an informed market. I won't go into what I think is going wrong in our country right now -- or why I don't believe it can be fairly said that we are living either in a democracy or a functioning capitalist market and how it's our own faults -- but what's relevant to this discussion is that I think it's always in any buyer's interest, naturally enough, to know something about the market so they don't waste their money. Duh, right? We all know that. I also think this idea can be extended - I believe the whole market is ultimately better off when consumers are informed. Some sellers might lose in the short term -- but mainly those who are charging more than a product is worth, or selling a useless, unwanted, or low-quality product -- and they, too, are ultimately better off by providing what their market actually wants (or going into another line of work). You'd think they'd want to know what actually will sell and keep buyers coming back over and over, rather than just lazily trying to make what money they can from overpriced crap until the bottom inevitably falls out and they hope they can run off scot free like certain CEOs we've all read about.

I don't know about you, but I've been seeing an awful lot of the latter, lately. I've also been seeing an incredible amount of sheer general incompetence on the part of nearly every company I've tried to buy anything from in recent years. Crappy products. Screwed-up orders. Deliberate deception. Inaccurate charges that require months to get fixed, if they ever do. Unfair practices that no one seems to have the power to stop. And what is up with how every electronics device on earth breaks precisely a week or so after the warranty is up, no matter how long the warranty??

How does this relate to yarn?

First, the ONLY companies I can think of that I've never had any problems with in recent years (besides Trader Joe's and Amazon.com, which are pretty much the only other places I spend any money any more, besides farm stands and other independent sellers) have been people who sell yarn or knitting supplies. I'm convinced, of course, that knitting makes people better people, so this has got to have something to do with it.

But, I've also had a few, very few, bad experiences with yarns and stores, and I've heard quite a bit from others who buy more yarn from the big distributors than I do about poor quality and high prices. And then I read about Sarah, and her controversy.

And, as I've also mentioned here before, I have this overpowering dread sometimes that this whole knitting-as-yoga trend will dry up, the LYS's will close, and it won't be possible to find good yarn at all anymore. You understand - I'm a child of the 80s, and I have bad Red Heart-related memories. And I still haven't got the hang of spinning.

I always pay close attention when I hear knitters tell stories about periods in their life when they knew how to knit but didn't actively do it, and why. Usually, the reasons include one or both of the following:

1. there was no good yarn available
2. the knitter got stuck on something difficult, or a project that wasn't turning out as well as it was meant to, and lacking any better ideas, they stuck the thing in a closet and forgot about it.

I'm happy - SO HAPPY - to see that the internet is making an enormous difference in making it possible for no knitter to ever suffer from tragedy #2 any more. Those who aren't online also have the LYS, which for now at least is an entity springing up seemingly on every corner. As for tragedy #1....I'm still afraid.

I also think that a lot of the big companies - and Sarah's experience with Tilli Tomas confirmed this - are just out there to take advantage of what they see as a passing fad, and as in any new market where consumers are perceived as a bunch of ignorant, indiscriminate newbies with money to burn, a lot of crap is being pushed out there, and a lot of yarns that range in quality from crap to delicious are being sold for much more than they're actually worth, presumably because the producers think they need to inflate their profits now to make up for the bottom falling out of this market when all us trendsters move on to skateboarding, or collecting dolls.

I'm not trying to suggest that manufacturers and distributors shouldn't make a healthy profit, much less, god FORBID, that LYS's should be squeezed out. I'm suggesting that a handful of the largest companies shouldn't be allowed to make off literally like bandits at the expense of the general health of our craft and the small stores and producers who make it truly worthwhile.

As I said in my earlier post, I'm afraid that many people who do come to knitting because of the fad may run into a third, relatively new tragic reason to abandon knitting:

3. they're getting fleeced (please excuse the pun - sheep don't deserve this) by greedy companies, and/or sucked into buying "luxury" yarn that is actually kind of a pain in the butt to work with, because they walked into the wrong store.

I don't think we need to protect yarn distributors or stores that make up for their poor management skills or ignorance of their own market by falsely hiking up prices, on the premise that buyers are too dumb to notice.

I DO think we should do everything we can to protect the hand-spinners, the small companies providing an original service (both "brick-and-mortar" and otherwise, and most online companies like Sarah's Yarn's and KnitPicks DO pay for staff and premises) and the LYS's that do their best to make knitting affordable, easy to learn, and fun for everybody who wants to try.

I think the best way to do this, as I said in the previous post, is to be informed consumers. Above all, it's in our best interests to make knitting less like yoga and more like gardening - one of those hobbies that will be around forever, and that can afford to keep reputable, honest, legal companies in business keeping practictioners well-supplied.

As for Lion Brand - see Laura's latest post on that topic if you haven't already, and its comments.

About KnitPicks and handspun yarns (apparently my previous post wasn't entirely clear on this - sorry, I thought it said more than it did):

My own personal ideal would be to knit only locally and organically, just like I would prefer to eat that way, but for me it's not quite possible yet (though I think I'm working toward it).

As I said in my previous post, it's the handspun and/or handdyed yarns made by artisans that actually are worth high prices, and I'm willing (or will be, as soon as I have an income =] ) to pay for the time, expertise, craftsmanship, and art that are put into precisely these kinds of yarns.

That's not what I'm talking about with Tilli Tomas, or Lion Brand, or the vast majority of what they stock at String.

I'm more than willing to pay fair prices for truly good yarn - I'm anxious to do so! I'm not asking for cheap yarn - I'm asking to pay the right people a fair price, period. The chief purpose, for me, behind my whole campaign with these posts is to keep knitting popular, fulfilling, and rewarding precisely so artisans can actually make a living through spinning, dyeing, designing, writing, teaching and making and distributing materials for knitters. I want it to be possible for artisans to do this, not just huge companies who operate under conditions consumers aren't allowed to know about.

I DON'T think KnitPicks can in any way be meaningfully compared to Walmart. KnitPicks IS committed to fair trade and sustainable production! Just because something is cheap and popular (or machine-spun) don't make it bad! Sometimes, in a very few cases, it might mean a business is actually being run by sentient, even highly intelligent and moral, human beings.

Rather, my complaint with Lion Brand could be fairly accurately re-worded by saying I think they're a bit too much like Walmart. They're cashing in on consumers' need to feel like they're getting a bargain, yet there actually is no bargain...the goods aren't worth having, and not worth even the relatively low prices asked for them. (In my not-so-humble opinion.)

[Okay, I'm going to be a little facetious here, but - does the new catalog look mean they're trying to move up from Walmart to Target? I little more flash, a little higher prices, but same crap??]

When a company combines ethics and passion with efficiency and sheer managerial competence (wonder of wonders!), other companies tend to get pissed, and scared. I'm all for supporting ethics and passion when they are combined with competence, and I don't see why that shouldn't be the standard we expect when we pay good money for something. In fact, in most areas of my life, even though right now my income is well below the poverty line and I owe a truly staggering figure in educational debt, I would be only too DELIGHTED to pay for quality and competence. If only I could find some. So far, I've found it almost exclusively in the knitting and yarn world. I want to keep it that way, fad or no fad. That's my bottom line.

In her summary of my post for Yarnival, Eve suggested that a place like Yarndex could work much better than any kind of button as a centralized venue for honest yarn reviews. I agree, but this depends on knitters going there and reviewing like crazy. She's right though - wouldn't it be amazing if you could shop for yarn the same way you do at amazon.com or buy.com - based on reviews? This requires having enough reviews that consensus emerges, so that a product won't be unfairly hurt based on a fluke or someone with a grudge.

Looking further into the future, I'm really excited about Brenda Dayne's idea for an all-encompassing knitting encyclopedia, presumably on the Wiki model. There are wikis for everything these days. The writing program I taught in last year uses one as a resource for assignments, handouts, and exercises - teachers deposit them there, and as each semester goes by, the wiki is built up into a massive resource for new teachers. There's even a wiki for my favorite band, of all things: This Might Be a Wiki. It sounds like this is more or less what Brenda has in mind, as a compendium of Creative-Commons-protected knitting patterns, techniques, and ideas. It could also be a compendium of information on yarn and yarn companies that could help to shape our little market into a strong, healthy, creative, ethical force from which everyone who participates benefits. That's how democracy is supposed to work too, and I for one still think it's possible. But you have to participate.

Maybe I'm wrong about some or all of what I've posted here. I don't claim to be as well informed as I should be about all of the issues I've touched on here, or all of the companies I've directly or obliquely referred to. I'm open to having my mind changed, but this is what I know now, and what I think about it, for what that's worth.



Now, because this is all rather heavy...I'm going to post, separately, a few memes I've had floating around here, so there's something to read while I'm away in New Hampshire. And - in case you hadn't noticed - I changed my template! Woo-hoo!! I did it with much help and moral support from Laura, who helped even though my whole reason for doing it was that I was jealous of her ability to put a pretty yarn picture in her header. I will miss my history-themed template a bit (it seemed so right at the time), but fortunately some of my favorite blogs also use it, so I'll still see it around. And this one is much easier to color-coordinate with my pictures! :-)

The Yarn Market

I mentioned in yesterday's post that Laura had also posted about the new look in the latest Lion Brand catalog, and there's a lively discussion going on in the comments over there about what this means and how much people like it or are suspicious of it. Laura emailed me about a comment which was actually made by a different Kate, as it happens (there seem to be a lot of us Kates in the knit blogger universe, as one of the other Kates once commented on my blog - something about people named Kate being strongly attracted to knitting??). Anyway, I actually agree much more with Laura and some of her other commenters, Theresa and Stephanie, that what we've seen in the new catalog is, though more aesthetically pleasing, really just a mask for yarn that is still essentially not too good, or at any rate overpriced for what it is.

I do agree with many that LB yarns have their uses. We have a good outlet here for LB here in NYC, at a little old-fashioned store called P&S Fabrics, south of Canal, so I have occasionally bought some LB stuff there, especially when I was first learning my way around yarn shopping, c. 2001. At P&S, they really specialize in Red Heart and Bernat, so the LB almost counts as high-end there. I go there pretty frequently for Patons Classic Wool for felting, and for cheap notions, but I've also purchased some LB wool-ease and microfiber in my time. And every time I've been dissatisfied - the microfiber was splitty and pilly, and the wool-ease felt too much like acrylic, especially over time, and ultimately convinced me that that was one thing I couldn't compromise on. I went back there recently to get kitchen cotton for Mason-Dixon projects, and considered the LB cotton...until I calculated the cost per weight of yarn and realized that it was much more expensive than Peaches and Cream for exacly the same product.

So, while it sort of gratifies me, as I said yesterday, to see that someone over there at Lion Brand actually woke up and realized that the stuff they were showing before didn't appeal to much of anyone who wasn't running a blog devoted to fug, on the whole I think the recent change we see in the catalog may have been wrought for sinister purposes. That is, I wonder whether they aren't hiking up their aesthetic as a way of hiking up the prices on what will still be the same old yarn. I think there is a place for cheap yarn (a big, gawping void to fill, in fact, between Red Heart and the sumptuous but pricey natural-fiber yarns), and I've always been appreciative of LB for fearlessly leaping in to cater to that market, and like I said, their yarn has its uses. But that's only if it stays cheap, and frankly, even before the catalog makeover it wasn't as cheap as it should be. When I can get sumptuous, natural-fiber yarns from KnitPicks for less, what's the point of Wool-Ease? I'd be only too delighted if LB took their cue from KnitPicks' success and start moving toward that same business model. But instead it looks - just looks, so far - like they might instead be moving toward higher glam, higher prices, same old crap, and hoping knitters will take a good long while to catch on. After all, thousands of people are still learning to knit everyday, and some of them never find the online knitting community. LB is heavily stocked at places like Wal-Mart, where there's no KnitPicks to compete with.

Coincidentally, just yesterday I browsed over to check out this controversy involving Tilli Tomas and price fixing, that Brenda Dayne mentioned on the last Cast-On. It sounds to me like LB is aspiring to do what Tilli Tomas and the other "luxury" yarn companies have been doing for a long time - trying to convince knitters - probably mostly the novices who should not be deliberately imposed upon in this way! - that just because a yarn is expensive, they're getting a "luxurious" experience out of knitting it. Never mind the relative qualities of the actual yarn! In fact, it looks from what I read on Sarah's blog like Tilli Tomas is pretty well convinced that their own yarn isn't worth what they want to charge for it.

Because of my grad student budget, I've always had to buy discounted or sale yarn, or get it in Russia where they import it directly from Peru, usually, or Spain or Germany, and sell it at what must be a very small markup (and what constitutes probably the maximum anyone would pay there, as salaries are so low), but the thing is - I've learned from experience that my yarns can do anything the super-expensive, lavishly-advertised yarns can do. The only yarns I really covet that I can't afford to find through KnitPicks, elann.com, School Products cones, at in-store sales or in Russia are hand-dyed and/or handspun, and I think most of those are worth every penny charged for them when they're made by hand by an experienced artisan who puts way more time into them than they can ever be properly compensated for. I've been to "String," the "luxury yarn" store on the Upper East Side, and while there were a few cashmeres at over $100 a skein that felt almost as soft as my Peruvian baby alpaca yarn from Moscow ($1.67), most of their stock looked...just like Lion Brand. Lots of eyelash and sequins and beads. And sure, the flashy bits might have been made of glass sometimes, and were undoubtedly attached to natural fibers instead of acrylic, but I personally found that, though they looked pretty on the skein, I didn't want to knit with them. Almost everything that wasn't just a ball of pure silk or cashmere (both of which can be tricky to knit with and are often better in a blend) was clearly meant as a scarf project - i.e., aiming straight for the novice knitter who maybe hasn't been in other yarn stores and doesn't know what to expect in terms of quality or prices. They're obviously catering to a certain crowd of very wealthy, mostly NYC/LA women who have latched on to the Hollywood side of the knitting trend and don't yet know enough about what makes a good knitting yarn, or what's a fair price, to see that they're being swindled. Some of these women will probably learn better and, hopefully, learn to spend their abundant cash on truly worthwhile artisan yarns, but many will probably just get over the knitting fad all too soon without ever realizing that they've essentially been cheated out of the best parts of the craft - making something beautiful of out truly high-quality materials.

As for the rest of us who only occasionally indulge in a yarn that means luxury to us, how many of us have been burned, either realizing later that another, less expensive yarn would have been as good, or paid a lot for a yarn that turned out to have yecchy qualities when knitted or washed? I suppose it's only natural in what is, on this scale at least, something of an emerging market. As consumers, we're learning how to buy yarn, and many manufacturers and distributors are testing the limits of our credibility. We are avid consumers, obsessed with our craft. Many, probably most of the individual small-scale yarn sellers (and some of the biggies, too!) are devoted, passionate crafters themselves who want only to connect knitters with the best materials and techniques. But there are also a lot of business people out there reading about "the new yoga" and hoping to cash in quick before we all catch on.

So...I want to catch on. I want to figure out how we, as knitters, can protect ourselves and our craft and develop our buying power into a strategy that will ensure a steady stream of high-quality yarn at reasonable prices for years and decades to come. Can we do this? Of course - knitters can do anything!

But what, specifically, can individual knitters do now? The discussion on Sarah's site is already working out some solutions. Brenda Dayne is clearly working on issues relating to these (and also to publishing and distributing patterns and techniques, a whole 'nother can of worms), and is devoting the next series of her wonderful podcast to problems of copyright and exploring creative commons laws. We can also all try to be more critical consumers and thinkers. I for one want to use my little yarn-buying budget to support the yarn sellers who operate in a way I really believe in (I think elann, KnitPicks and Webs are great, and am delighted to have learned now about Sarah's Yarns). In the same way that Brenda decided to accept sponsorship for her podcast only from companies that she wholeheartedly believes in as providing good quality at a good price in an ethical manner, we can all do the same every time we choose where to purchase a product. Of course, making good purchasing decisions depends on information, but this is where the internet in general and knit bloggers in particular really come in to save the day. There's never before been such an easy, fast, and adaptable way for any community to keep itself informed! In many ways, we all do this already, by recommending certain yarns or companies, and passing on warnings. Sarah is helping to make us all aware of the price-fixing issue, and I hope that information can be disseminated quickly all over the knit blogger community. But if the knitters who get hit hardest are those who have just stepped into a yarn store for the first time, and probably aren't yet plugged into the online knitting community and may never be - how do we let them know? I'm not sure there's a way, but the online knitting community is so huge and so avid that we might just be powerful enough as a lobby in our own right to have a real impact on the market for the better.

I suggested on Sarah's site that one small way to start would be a button, containing a constantly updated list of price-fixing yarn companies that bloggers could post on their sites as an indication of their intent to boycott these companies. The button could link back to the discussion on Sarah's blog or anywhere else to explain the situation. I see it as working kind of like the lists of companies kept by the Better Business Bureau - those that comply with basic good business practices (and the law) will be taken off the list, but those that get consistent complaints from consumers will stay on, to inform and warn other consumers. Companies will obviously have a strong incentive to stay off any such list, and that will, in effect, force them to comply with good business practices. Maybe we could also develop a gold-star list of great companies providing wonderful services - or maybe an annual awards extravanganza?? I've volunteered to make a plain anti-price-fixing button linking to Sarah's site (as those who know my blog know, it's not hard to make a plain button), but I don't know how to do anything more complicated. If you do, and you'd like to get involved - go to Sarah's site and let her know (she's offering free yarn!!) And, of course, either idea would require someone to put in some time to stay on top of the lists of companies. I can't do this and still finish my dissertation before my money runs out, but I'm sure someone out there can and will do it!

And the best thing we can all do, of course, is to first write to any companies we have problems with and give them the opportunity to adjust their practices and marketing to best please their customers, before we take any other measures. Most of them, I would assume, would be only too pleased to do so if they really see a strong response. Sarah lists the address for Tilli Tomas feedback on her site, and of course you can look up the Tilli Tomas site itself.

This post is not, I should mention, intended as a condemnation of Lion Brand yarns or the Lion Brand company. I haven't been a particularly great fan of their yarn since I've found better alternatives elsewhere, but I do think they offer a service to the knitting community and I have no knowledge of anything wrong with their business practices at all. Rather, the marketing change they've made in their recent catalog simply got me thinking, and made me wonder about what might, or might not, be behind it, and any possible connection to the price-fixing practices - and generally unpleasant marketing strategies - of the companies named in the discussion at Sarah's site. Same goes for what I said about String - I only conveyed my impression of my one brief visit there, and what this made me think about. I do not intend to imply anything beyond the heavily qualified and subjective statements actually made here in black and white.

I'd love to hear comments about any of these issues, and most of all suggestions as to how we as knitters and yarn buyers can best influence the yarn market in everyone's best interests.