Six Little Mice Sat Down To Spin

I'm back from a three day vacation to Portland! Eating in restaurants, shopping, and not having to clean..that's really my idea of relaxing.

I went to Yarnia and spent more than an hour, trying to wrap my brain around the concept and pick some yarn. The deal is, you pick out some coned yarn, up to six different yarns, and they will combine the strands together and wind them onto a cone and sell them to you priced by the pound. Keep in mind that your resulting cones will not contain plied yarn, it's strands of yarn wound onto a cone but not twisted into a cohesive yarn.

I was excited to check it out, it's pretty affordable compared to brand-name yarn, and you can mix and match many different fiber and color combinations.

It's a different way of thinking about yarn buying. I went in hoping for wool by itself or combined with strands of linen, rayon, or mohair. And I wasn't looking for high-contrast color combinations. I found that the color selection was much better for the cottons. And for most of the wools that I liked there was only a cone or two on the shelf. I had a hard time finding enough cones to combine to get the thickness I wanted, which meant 4-6 strands of yarn to get DK weight to chunky, depending on which yarn I picked. It sounds like they are getting more yarn in all the time, so it's possible that there may be more available on another day.



I settled on the one pictured, two strands of two-ply wool combined with three strands of linen. It worked out to somewhere between worsted and chunky weight, and 1/2 pound, which works out to about 250 yards, set me back about $13. I like the rough/shiny look, as well as the low-contrast color combination.

I made another pick as well, gray and blue merino combined to make DK weight. I am not sure about the color combo, so I am going to ponder this one a bit. It may be crazy but I am thinking about separating the colors and re-winding the cones. It was worth the price, which was about $28 for a pound, but maybe I'll like it better as two separate colors.