About us

Our philosophy

Our philosophy is simple: only offer products we would use ourselves, carefully selected by our staff, at reasonable prices.

That sounds obvious, but it rules out a lot. We don't stock a yarn because a distributor is clearing it, or because the color card photographs well. Someone here has to have knit with it, blocked it, washed it, and still wanted more.

How we choose yarn

Two decades of ordering, knitting and selling yarn has given us a good nose for which lines are worth carrying — and which ones look wonderful on a color card and disappoint on the needles. That judgment is most of what we do here.

Every line we carry has to earn its shelf space on three counts:

• It behaves. It knits to a predictable gauge, blocks the way the ball band claims, and survives a wash without felting into a brick.
• The color is honest. We shoot our own product photos with professional equipment and lighting rather than leaning on the mill's stock images, and we don't push the color around afterwards. Screens and dye lots being what they are, that gets you close rather than exact — see colors and product photos.
• The price makes sense. Being cheap is no strike against a yarn — several of our favorites cost very little. But when one costs more, the difference has to be something you can see or feel in your hands: a rarer fiber, a mill that spins it better, a dye house that gets the color right. We won't stock a yarn that's expensive only because of the label on the band.

Dye lots, and why we go on about them

A dye lot is a single run through the dye bath. Two lots of the same colorway can differ just enough that a sweater shows a faint line where you changed skeins — invisible in the ball, obvious across a yoke.

So when you order several skeins of one colorway, we pull them from the same lot whenever stock allows, and we tell you before we ship if we can't. It's the single most common reason a customer writes to us, and the easiest thing for a shop to quietly get wrong.

Read the full policy under matching dye lots.

Shipping from Sandpoint

We pack and ship everything ourselves from northern Idaho. Orders placed by 2pm Pacific Time on a business day usually leave the same day, and US ground shipping is free over $95.

We ship within the United States. See shipping & returns for rates, timing, and how returns work.

Free patterns

The pattern explorer is our back catalog of free patterns — decades of them, from quick dishcloths to full garments. They're free because a pattern is only useful if someone knits it, and because they tend to sell yarn far better than an ad ever has.

Talk to us

Questions about substitutions, gauge, or how much yarn a project really needs are the fun part of this job.

• Browse the help topics for the quick answers.
• Or write to us — we usually reply within one business day.