Last fall, my knitting world was at its best. I attended a knitting convention with an abundance of yarn on offer. I had a terrific subscription service sending me luxurious yarns from Peru every month, and if I wanted anything at all knitting-related on short notice, I just jumped in my car and headed to a lovely local yarn store or took my pick from three big box craft stores near my home.
That was the best of times – knitwise – and now it’s looking like the worst of times. I can certainly place orders for yarn, but will I actually receive it? Who knows? Some of the yarn I ordered during this quarantine took a month to arrive; other yarn has yet to arrive. One of the big box stores flat out cancelled my order. My go-to source for looking up unfamiliar techniques I needed for advanced projects, Bluprint, announced a shut-down in late May. Then, boom, yesterday the local yarn shop in my community announced its closing.
Will we ever get back to the “normal” ways we purchased yarn and learn new knitting techniques? Even in the last two weeks, I’ve changed how I buy yarn and from whom. Most of my yarn purchases had moved to online purchases anyway, but I’m finding myself looking closely at which sellers actually have yarn in stock and which do not. I’m delighted to have found a yarn store in South Carolina that seems to have lots of yarn on hand and gets my yarn shipped to my door in two days. If it weren’t for all this change, I would never have ordered from them.
Despite this rapidly changing economy, the knitting world will eventually settle out. There WILL be changes, and some of those changes WILL be for the better. Though we’ll mourn the loss of our favorite local stores, we may well celebrate finding new purveyors of yarn we’d never heard of before.
Knitting has been around for hundreds of years, if not longer. Whatever happens to our favorite knitting suppliers, we will still manage to get hold of some kind of fiber and make something beautiful with it. The world will go on, change and all, and we will keep on knitting through the good times and the bad.
Blessings, Cindy
This is my first blog post in a couple of months. I’ve been homeschooling and caring for a family member with a serious illness. Thanks to everyone who has checked out my older posts and read my books!!! Much appreciated!!!
Cynthia Coe is the author of The Prayer Shawl Chronicles, a collection of interrelated short stories about knitters and those they meet through knitting and sharing prayer shawls.
Copyright 2022 Cynthia Coe
Sycamore Cove Knitting 