YarnYAY! to Cease Production of Yarn Subscription Boxes

Vickie Howell, yarn industry cheerleader extraordinaire and founder of YarnYAY!, a subscription box for knitters and crocheters, has announced that the company will cease production of the boxes this winter.

The December box will be the last one for people who purchased the monthly subscription plan; quarterly subscribers will get a last package for winter in January.

Howell says in a Facebook post announcing the closure that the company kind of fell into her lap at a time when she was looking at getting into retail but wasn’t sure how to do it. The long version is in the post, but the short version is, after expected support from CrateJoy fell through at the last minute, she ended up taking on the whole project herself.

The first crates went out in May 2018 and were focused on knitters, but since June of that year both knitting and crochet projects have been offered in the boxes, which include yarn, notions, patterns and other fun stuff.

Howell says YarnYAY! has partnered with more than 175 small businesses to provide products and patterns for the crates.

“Over the past 18 months however, while prices from everything from fiber and cardboard, to software and shipping have relentlessly continued to rise, subscribers to our monthly box (YarnYAY’s main source of revenue) have steadily dropped,” she wrote. “The losses have snowballed and now, to quote an infamous start-up CEO’s recent announcement, ‘we have more debt than assets.'”

In order to support Howell and the YarnYAY! team through this transition, she asks that people buy the December box or preorder the quarterly box. There will also be inventory clearances going on over the next few months as operations wind down, so be on the lookout for that as well.

We’re always sorry to see a bit of the fiber arts industry go, and we wish Vickie (who’s a former Craft Gossip-er from way way back!) the best in whatever’s next.

[Photo: YarnYAY!]

Darn Good Yarn 50% off Monthly Yarn Subscriptions

New Knitting Subscription Box Service by Vickie Howell

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]

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