Yarn Stalking: The New Olympic Sport
F5. F5. F5.
It was a dark and stormy night.
Somewhere, far away in Germany, a dyer uploaded her inventory.
And all hell broke loose.
That’s the essence of a Wollmeise yarn update. Since Claudia has gone to unannounced updates, her dedicated fans spend most of their weekend stalking her website and hoping for an update. I’m not sure how unannounced updates are supposed to help with the drama. It’s taking disappointed customers and adding a side of sleep deprivation to the mix. However, I want to try this myself sometime, just because I think it would be a novel experience to buy yarn from the single most hyped yarn dyer right now.
I did, however, a little yarn stalking myself, but it wasn’t Wollmeise. It was the Sanguine Gryphon.
I’ve been reading her blog for a long time now. Her posts are usually crammed with pictures of freshly dyed yarn which she sells on her website. I never bought from her–and then I heard about Bugga. It’s a 70% merino, 20% cashmere, 10% nylon sock yarn and all the colorways are inspired by..bugs! I heard all this hype about it, and so I determined that I would try it. I managed to get my hands on a skein of bright tomato red and it was everything that I dreamed about it. Soft, intensely vibrant colors-it was amazing.
However, the updates were already feverish. I didn’t want to assume that I could get this yarn anytime, so I marked down the next update on my list. She posted the colorways that she was updating on her blog, and a few new ones.
I fell in love with the color and the name of one of the new ones–Blue Arsed Fly. Yes, that is an actual bug.
Behold:
The update time was 8:00. A Ravelry friend, craftinginsanity, commented on my red Bugga socks. We messaged back and forth and voila! She revealed that she had some yarn money burning a hole in her pocket, so she marked down the time, too. She fell in love with the Blue Arsed Fly as well.
When the update happened, it was all reflex. I hit the ‘add to cart’ button. I refreshed my way through the numerous error 500 screens. And finally, finally-I got to Paypal and I got my yarn.
My pictures do terrible justice to a stunning skein of yarn. Deep blue that treads that fine line between blue and purple–turquoise, silver-blue–all melded into one fat, squishy skein of yarn.
I almost hesitate to blog about this because since that last update, Sanguine Gryphon is temporarily switching her methods until she can get a sturdier website. She’s using a lottery method. She posts the list of available colorways that week. You can choose up to two skeins in any of the colorways, and you post in the specific thread in the Ravelry group. After 24 hours, she closed it, and randomly picked 50 winners. I thought it worked very well, and it’s a great temporary measure until the new website.
This skein, along with another (shhh) that I traded my soul to get, is going to become part of my new, highly ambitious sock project—but that will come later!
