October, 2007
So I'm opening my own yarn store. But not just any yarn store -- a make your own yarn store. I really do have to begin this tale by giving a shout-out here to the magasin behind this madness, La Bobineuse de Laine -- or Yarnia Proper, as I now affectionately refer to it.
I first encountered this gem of a store one fateful fall day in Montreal circa 2004, snow already on the ground. In search of a yarn store that was cheaper and less snooty than the one on Rachel and St-Hubert, and more respectable than buying our yarn at Zeller's, my dear friend Hollis and I trekked down L'avenue du Mont-Royal for 45 minutes, with little forewarning that what we were about to stumble upon would change my relationship with yarn forever.
Fighting against the -40 degree wind chill and berating the website that erroneously implied this store would be on the corner of Mont-Royal and du Parc -- an easy bus ride up from McGill -- we committed to pressing eastward to the 2200 block, with nothing left to guide us but an address, concluding that this would either be the biggest disappointment and waste of an afternoon ever, or the best-kept secret in Montreal.
As you can probably guess, this place blew my mind. Cottons, acrylics, wools, boucle...even silk and mohair and metallics -- boxes of these fibers lined the walls, filled with innumerable colors wound in uneven amounts on cones. My first reaction was disappointment. How could anyone be expected to knit with yarn this fine? I must be too much of an amateur to be shopping here...but then, turning to face the other wall, I realized that I had merely entered a universe that was an entire rung lower on the production chain than most people ever experience yarn.
These single filaments, I realized, piled nearly to the ceiling in boxes of like colors, were single-ply strands of yarn, waiting to be wound into what we everyday hand-knitters recognize as worsted weight commercial yarn. Or really, whatever weight I wanted. The beauty of this store I had discovered was that yarn was sold not by the skein, nor the hank, nor the ball...but by the pound.
Choose your fiber -- you want 100% cotton? Half wool, half acrylic so it's not too itchy? Want to add in a few strands of mohair or silk? Now choose your colors -- up to six of them, in whatever combination or ratio you want. And this personalized yarn you just designed, how much do you want -- a pound? I watched as the endearing Quebecoise lady who owned the shop loaded my choices onto a machine with surprising dexterity -- a machine that looked like it was constructed in this room specifically to trigger the industrial revolution, and had not moved since. It was magnificent.
I watched as -- in a matter of seconds -- a full pound of my customized yarn was spun onto a cone, slid off the spindle, and handed to me. "Ça va être douze dollars," she told me, and I gaped back in astonishment. I had, I realized, just stumbled upon the enchanted world of Yarnia.
The preternatural veil of this experience led me to honestly wonder, would I ever be able to find this place again? Is this a one-time deal? I would not have been startled in the slightest to try for a return visit, only to find an entirely different retail block with no sign of this shop ever having existed. In fact, I expected this as a near certainty, so I stocked up and exited with as much yarn as I could carry home.
Well surprisingly, my return venture out to the far stretches of Mont-Royal a month later did not fail me, and for the next four years I swam in a sea of beautiful, custom-blended, obscenely cheap yarn and never set foot in a conventional yarn boutique again.
Fast forward to the summer of 2006 where, having just moved back to the States and my hometown of Seattle, I found myself in a state of panic familiar to any knitter who finds themselves in a new environment, no longer within walking distance to their lifeline LYS. Surely, the duffel bag stuffed to capacity with coned yarn that I had gorged myself on with one last trip to La Bobineuse de Laine and smuggled through customs would last me a good long while...but I needed a sustainable solution.
Turns out, though, that the innovation of what I now affectionately refer to as Yarnia Proper was rarer than I had even realized, as I Google-mapped every yarn store in Seattle and spent my summer trekking to each in eager anticipation of discovering the one that would spin me cheap yarn by the pound. I described the process and what I was searching for to shop owners to be met with blank stares, and learned to leave the car running while I took a mere glance inside the shops, now coming to expect the disappointing array of designer yarns, skeins perfectly stacked in neat square cubbies along the walls, promising a secure and predictable knitting experience, but for a price: $6.80 for a 50-gram ball of 100% cotton?! $17.99 for an 7-ounce hank of Peruvian wool? What if I want to knit something more than a wrist cuff? This cannot sustain my lifestyle.
Well then, if no yarn store in Seattle (or Portland -- I checked) can offer me design-your-own yarn by the pound, I'll just have to open one myself.
