There’s a woman coming to meet me at a coffee shop in Long Beach today. She’s going to buy some of it. She doesn’t know what I have. I don’t know if she’ll want any of it. I just know that I want it to end up somewhere it will be made into something.
That’s how Stash Your Yarn started.
I’ve been knitting and crocheting for as long as I can remember. Long enough that my taste has changed. Long enough that my size has changed. Long enough that whole brands have come and gone, leaving nothing behind but the yarn on my shelves and the memory of the shop I used to buy it in.
I have baskets in the closet. Baskets under the bed. There’s a beautiful merino from a mill in Vermont that closed six years ago, and I’m halfway through the sweater I started with it. If I run out, I’ll never find more. Not in a store. Not online. Not anywhere except in somebody else’s stash.
The half-skein problem
Every knitter I know has this problem, from both sides. We have more yarn than we’ll ever use. And we get to the last three rows of a shawl and realize we’re one half-skein short of finishing.
You can’t buy a half-skein. You can’t buy the right dye lot from a store that stopped carrying that yarn two years ago. What you can do — what makers have always done — is find somebody who has it, and ask nicely.
That’s the whole idea. Somewhere out there, the exact yarn you need is sitting in a basket in someone else’s house, waiting to be made into something. Stash Your Yarn just introduces you.
What I want it to feel like
I want it to feel the way it feels when I walk into my favorite local yarn store. Quiet. Warm. Full of people who know things. No one shouting. No one selling. Just the yarn, the makers, and the small joy of the right skein finding the right hands.
I want the destasher to feel like she’s giving her yarn a proper send-off, not putting it out with the trash. I want the rescuer to feel relief. I want the magpie to feel a little bit of that guilty delight that only happens at eleven at night.
And I want the whole thing to be so simple that my mother could use it. She can’t. She doesn’t knit. But she could, and that’s the standard.
What’s next
We’re inviting the first five hundred makers into a private beta this fall. If that’s you — if any part of this letter felt like it was written about you — leave your email at the bottom of the home page. We’ll write you when we’re ready.
Thank you for reading this far.
— Julie