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An Update on the Stitches/XRX Story

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Recently I shared the news that XRX, the company behind the Stitches live and virtual events, had announced it would be filing for bankruptcy and was canceling all events. So far the actual filing doesn’t seem to have happened, and a search of the South Dakota Secretary of State’s website shows that XRX, Inc. is still in good standing, with its next annual filing due in June (the last one was filed June 17, 2022). The statement on their website says the company is “in the process of being dissolved” and that they are working with an as-yet unnamed bankruptcy attorney who should be contacted by creditors.

A virtual Stitches event wrapped up the day before the announcement that future Stitches events would not move forward and  teachers were not paid for those classes. There was also a virtual event happening in June that students have already paid for and teachers will not be paid for.

The next in-person event was slated for Minneapolis in August, so there are lots of victims here, including:

  • teachers who were planning classes, bought supplies, paid for travel and were expecting to be paid for the event
  • yarn companies big and small and other vendors planning to attend who might have paid for travel and who now have excess inventory without a place they were counting on to sell
  • students and others planning to attend who are out registration fees and travel expenses

While some travel expenses can be cancelled this far in advance without too much of a penalty, the main issue for students and others who wanted to attend the event is the registration fee, which likely would never be repaid by XRX.

There have been reports in the Screwed by Stitches Facebook group of people successfully getting chargebacks on their credit cards for these expenses. Even if the purchase was made outside the regular window for claims, it’s worth giving it a try because some credit card companies have been willing to consider the transaction date as being the date of the event rather than when the charge was made.

In that same group you will find lists of teachers and vendors who were scheduled to attend Stitches Midwest if you want to support them. I mentioned this in the first post, but if you are a vendor or teacher who has lost income from planned Stitches events that now aren’t happening, Knitty is offering free ads, and that’s another place the rest of us can go to support these members of our community.

LessonFace is offering reduced fees for teachers through August for those who would have been teaching at Stitches events and would like to use their platform. The offer is good on up to three three-hour sessions per teacher.

Jill Wolcott also has some great general advice on what to do when things go topsy turvy in the industry.

I’ll continue to update this story as there is more to tell.

Comments

  1. I am wondering if I should worry about my personal data, on the online account I had with Stitches.

Have you read?

Knit a Leopard Print Shawl and Learn about Yarn Substitution

When I was looking around for free knitting patterns to share recently, I came across this fun leopard print wrap from Yarnspirations. 

This fun bulky wrap gives you tons of practice with instarsia and makes a bold statement while keeping you warm. It’s rated for intermediate knitters and the design is charted but pretty easy to follow. And it’s only 50 rows and worked in bulky yarn, so it wouldn’t even take that long to knit. (You can grab the free pattern from Yarnspirations.)

So what’s the problem? The yarn that the pattern calls for has been discontinued, and it’s not a yarn that a substitute for immediately springs to mind. 

The original yarn was Patons Alpaca Blend, a single ply bulky yarn that was a combination of acrylic, superwash wool, nylon and alpaca. 

My first thought was Lion Brand Hue + Me, which is an acrylic and wool blend, with two plies instead of a single. It looks like it has the colors you would need to make this fun shawl. 

But as I was thinking about it, I thought this would be a good opportunity to introduce you to YarnSub if you don’t already know about it. This website is a giant database of yarn that can consider the qualities of the yarn you want to substitute and offer potential substitutions. 

It’s not only thinking about yarn weight, like I was, but also fiber content, number of plies, gauge and even the difference in yardage between one ball and another. It even looks at the price and can be filtered by your price range or preferences about fiber content (if, say, you’re sensitive or allergic to wool, for example, or don’t want to you acrylic). 

When I plugged in Alpaca Blend, it gave me a lot of different options, though many of them were self-striping or multicolored, which wouldn’t work for this project, and I don’t see a way to filter for solid colors only. 

Still, it’s a good tool to give you some ideas you might not know about or might have forgotten about, and it tells you how the new yarn is similar to the old one and how it differs, allowing you to make smarter choices when substituting yarns. 

[Photo: Yarnspirations]