Skip to main content

Thrifting Yarn

My yarn stash turned out to be much smaller than I thought, and I'm still trying to stick to my goal of not buying new material if I can thrift them, so I decided to see if I could find a decent lot at a reasonable price on ShopGoodwill.com. After looking through dozens of listings, and losing three or four, I decided on this one because it had a Buy It Now Option, it was a generous amount of yarn, it looked pretty new, and I liked all the colors.

I didn't mind paying $34.97 rather than bid on and risk losing the lot to someone else (the yarn bidders, I quickly learned to my dismay while trying to land other lots, are all last minute snipers.) Also, brand new yarn has gotten quite pricey, so even at the higher fixed price it was still a good deal.

Here's the yarn lot when it arrived. I was quite happy when I opened the bag and did not smell anything, and saw that all of the skeins were in clean, new or very good condition.

For my money I got 41 balls or skeins, more than I was expecting, as well as a giant spool of macrame cord. All the colors are shades I like, and want to make into things, so being picky about the colors was worth it. I also like the variety.

There were a few multiples; the most were 9 balls of this Bucilla cream-colored acrylic that could make a pretty wrap or scarf and hat set.

Also some pure wool and wool/acrylic blends. Glad almost everything came with a label.

I've heard of this scrubby-making yarn but I've never tried it. Might be easier on my hands than steel wool.

Not sure what I'm going to do with 220 yards of macrame cord, but I'll find a use for it.

I might be able to use some of the specialty yarns as embellishment in my art quilting, too.

I'm not going to look up prices for all the yarn, but I know some of it is pretty expensive; the supersavers are about $3.75 a skein and scrubby yarn is $4.49 a skein. I did price the Bloom on Premier's web site at $7.99 a skein. With the Buy It Now price I ended up paying about eighty-three cents per skein or ball. You can't find yarn for that price anywhere, so I know I got a good deal.

Image Credit: the first photo was taken from the auction listing at ShopGoodwill.com.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Downsizing

This was my fabric stash once I sorted everything -- 22 full bins. I spent a day taking out and boxing up what I could part with, with the goal of trying to reduce it by half, so I'd have 11 bins. I was very strict with myself, and removed everything that for one reason or another I was sure I wouldn't be able to use. This is what I ended up with -- 12 bins of fabric that I'm keeping. It's not quite half, but close enough. Half of what I took out went to a local quilter friend, a school and Goodwill. These four tightly-packed bins will be going to the local quilting guild once I make arrangements with them for a drop-off place. I am relieved and a little sad and now determined to control my impulses to thrift more fabric. I don't want to do this again, so until I use up six bins, I can't for any reason bring any new fabric into the house.

In Progress

I promised myself I would show you the good, bad and ugly of my cleaning this year. This is what it looks like when you dump thirty years' worth of stashed fabric on the floor -- and oy, what a pain in the butt to pick up again! This is what it looks like after it's been sorted, folded and placed in containers, which took me about a week. Now the hard part is to downsize my stash by at least half, I think (that's my goal, anyway.) I've already e-mailed the president of the local quilting guild, a local friend who is a quilter, and a public school art teacher I know to see if I can donate some of the excess to them. The rest will go to Goodwill. Already I've reduced my vintage textiles from two bins to one, and my scraps from three bins to one. It's probably the hardest clean-out I've done, which is why I saved it until last. I know I have too much fabric, more than I can use in my lifetime -- but at the same time, I love it. So I have to

Other Stashes

Along with clearing out the spare bedroom and tidying my office and our guest bedroom, I decided to reorganize some of my stashes. This is all the yarn I have on hand, sorted by color. It looks like a lot, but lately I've been using up a minimum of half a bin every month, so this is approximately a year's supply. All of my solid color cotton perle thread. I go through a lot of this every year, too. I need a container in which I can fit all of it together, but I haven't found the right one yet. I won't show you all of my fabric -- I'm still reorganizing this stash -- but I went through everything and donated two bins of fabric I won't need to the local quilter's guild.