If you’re anything like me, you are a bit of a yarn hoarder. I’m sure there are those of you reading who only purchase or make yarns for one project at a time, but I can hardly imagine such a world. Nope. I have shelves of yarn and a growing stash of spinning fiber. I wrote THIS blog post on a similar subject on March 19th, 2020. The yarn I was going to use during the few months of pandemic lock-down. Little did I know we would still be here in late August expecting it all to continue for the foreseeable future.*

I figure all that stash was waiting for this moment. Lock-down. Stay-at-home. Social distancing. COVID has given me more time in the studio. It is time to consider those “special” yarns and whether I need to gift them or use them or continue to save them.

I put the word special in quotations because the reason they’re special is almost entirely not because they’re expensive but because I have some emotional or sentimental connection to them. As the tapestry by Alex Marriott at the bottom of this post says, I am so blessed. Not only do I have the funds from time to time to purchase more yarn than I can use, I have equipment to knit or weave them on and some time to do those non-essential tasks.

Still, many of these yarns are special to me and I thought it would be interesting to dig them out, share them, and think about why I’ve been saving them, sometimes for years.

The special yarns

James Koehler

My primary tapestry teacher was James Koehler. I was a student and then an apprentice in his studio for many years. He passed away unexpectedly in 2011 and I was one of his apprentices who helped his family sort through his studio and hold an estate sale. His house had to be cleaned out and though it was painful to see strangers rummaging through his tools and books, I think most things went to appreciative weavers, many of whom were his students.

During that estate sale, I was able to get some of his hand-dyed yarn. Probably some of it I actually dyed as his apprentice. But the formulas were his and I didn’t know what they were and since I couldn’t afford one of his tapestries, I wanted something he had made. I’ve had a small bag of this yarn since that day in the summer of 2011. I pulled the yarn out often but never could use it.

That is until the day I had to choose some colors for the samples for my upcoming tapestry techniques book, The Art of Tapestry. I needed a color that I was sure existed in that small stash of James’ yarn. The deep blue in all of the samples you’ll see in the book was dyed by James. He intended to write a tapestry techniques book after he finished his autobiography, Woven Color, and life didn’t give him the time to do that. So now that I’ve written my version of that book, his yarn at least exists in the woven samples. Of course many of the techniques I teach I learned from him so it seems like a fitting tribute.

Tapestry yarn hand-dyed by James Koehler. The deep indigo blue is the color I used in my book’s woven samples.

Travel yarn

I was fortunate to be able to join a tapestry tour in France in 2019 with Cresside Collette. We saw a LOT of tapestry and a lot of yarn. But none of it was for sale. Until one of the last days in Aubusson we visited the dye studio of Thierry Rpger who supplies much of the yarn to a vast number of weavers in the area. He had yarn for sale and I came home with five skeins. After all, it squished into my backpack just fine. I can’t say the same for the huge pile of catalogs I struggled to get home. You can see that studio in the video blog I made of that day. The skill of this dyer was astounding. He is able to match colors exactly without measuring or formulas… just a little more green, a little more yellow, etc.

Hand-dyed yarns from Thierry Roger in Aubusson, France. These yarns still sit on a shelf in my studio. The “specialness” of them has not worn off enough for me to put them in a project.

Maggie Casey and the spinning fiber collection

Maggie was my spinning teacher. She still is because I have every intention of taking more classes with her if I ever get the chance. She was the co-owner of Shuttles Spindles and Skeins in Boulder, CO for decades. It was one of my favorite yarn shops and any excuse to drive the hour and a half to Boulder to visit was one I jumped at. I made that drive many times to take classes from Maggie or go to a spin-in. She taught me about spinning fleeces and to love spinning from fleece I prep myself. Once she split a beautiful fleece with me and she definitely was the one who introduced me to Sheep Feather’s Farm’s fleeces. I met Michelle of Hummingbird Moon through spin-ins and fell in love with her fabulous dyed braids. And I stocked up on undyed top from the store’s collection quite frequently if the amount I have in my fleece storage buckets is any indication.

I love this photo of Maggie. If I remember right, she wasn’t wild about the additions we were putting in this carded fiber in a drum carding class from Clemes and Clemes.

If you want to learn to spin, you can’t do better than Maggie Casey. She has a book and some videos and I suspect another book coming out sometime soon. But if ever you can take a class from her in person, do it. I couldn’t find any pictures of the fleeces she either split with me or helped me find, but they were and are lovely. Many of them are still in my basement. Thanks Maggie. I likely never would have ventured far from prepared fiber if it weren’t for you.

Yarn I bought to make myself feel better

Does anyone else use yarn as the go-to thing you shop for when you feel really crappy? Probably the number one reason I’ve saved money since COVID is that I can’t go to the yarn stores. There are four in Fort Collins and they’re all good. That isn’t even counting my previous not infrequent trips to Shuttles in Boulder before they closed. Yarn makes me feel better and so sometimes when things seemed a bit rocky,** I’d go to The Loopy Ewe where everything is lined up by yarn size and the colors are riotous. The staff is so helpful but not even remotely pushy and they never ever looked at me weirdly for wandering up and down the aisles squishing the yarn, deep in thought. I miss them.

On my last “I need a little shopping therapy” trips there before COVID, I bought a single skein of bright pink yarn. I didn’t have a pattern in mind, I just liked how it made me feel. It has been sitting on the shelf in my studio ever since and it cheers me to see it. I think perhaps now is the time to knit this one up because it now seems clear that the COVID social distancing, safer-at-home stuff isn’t going to end any time soon.

Hibiscus yarn from Julie Spins. The colorway is Hibiscus. The yarn is wool. Stress purchase which I still totally love.

Fiber show yarn

Do any of you do this? You go to a conference or a fiber show and the vendor hall feels like a magical place. Sheep and wool festivals are the most tempting for me because they really do feel like magic. There is that inside/outside thing that I love. The feeling that you’re so close to the animals and that the material you’re using comes from those amazing farmers who are showing the animals in a nearby pen. So you get a little carried away in the vendor hall because it feels like such a special place and maybe it really was a long trip to get there.

I now allow myself to get one skien or spinning braid at a show. One. Because they all seem special and I love to support indie dyers as well as farmers and makers. But my stash of one-skein wonders is getting out of hand. It is all knitting yarn. It is all fabulous. It is almost exclusively just one skein. The stash is getting large enough now that I can sometimes pair similar yarns to use in a bigger project, but by and large, these skeins are destined for small scarves, hats, and fingerless mitts. Maybe if I feel really ambitious I might make a pair of socks, but it hasn’t happened yet.

Clothroads Cashmere

In a similar vein is the tiny skein of cashmere I bought at the Clothroads Film Festival in Loveland I attended I believe in 2017. I saw many amazing films at that festival, but one of them was The Shepherdess of the Glaciers about the new cashmere center in Probang, India. You can see a trailer for that film as well as a longer film about the center on the Wildfibers website HERE. There is a marvelous story about a semi-nomadic group of people who raise cashmere goats but who sold their fiber because they didn’t have the means to spin it fine enough to process themselves. Linda Cartwright who started Wildfibers magazine, talks about how she and members of the village built a place to work and helped the women refine their spinning and knitting to produce yarn from their own cashmere.

At the festival, there was a small basket of this handspun cashmere from Pangong Craft Center. I had to buy a skein. This is yarn I want to make into something that I wear because the story deserves remembering frequently and a garment can bring a story back to us when we wear it. Please do go and watch the videos about this center and then I recommend watching The Shepherdess of the Glaciers. It won the grand prize at Banff Film Festival in 2016.

Cashmere handspun from the Pangong Craft Center in India. LOOK at that spinning! The Wildfibers website actually has some of this yarn HERE.

History yarn

I have some yarn left over from when I was learning to weave at Northern New Mexico College. This yarn sticks around because of that emotional tug. I did get rid of the Clasgens yarn we used to learn on. It didn’t seem special to me. But my final project there was from churro I purchased from Connie Taylor. At the time she had her own farm still and she had (if I am remembering correctly) fourteen different natural colors of churro. I dyed some of it for the project and the rest is still undyed in gorgeous shades of natural wool. It is blanket weight and beautiful quality as any of you who know Connie Taylor’s yarns have experienced.

Rebecca Mezoff with her first weaving in the Fiber Arts program at Northern New Mexico Community College in 2004.

Yarn from a class I wanted to take

I was going to take a Norwegian Billedev course from Robbie LaFleur this spring in Denver. I was really looking forward to it and I wanted to use a traditional type of yarn. So I expanded my stash of this beautiful yarn, originally recommended to me by Tommye Scanlin, to quite a few colors. And then COVID and the class was cancelled. It is still sitting in a bin in my studio where I look at it and wonder whether I can figure it out just from Marie Koppen’s book and reading Robbie’s blog. I think I could get a start anyway and one day, when Robbie can travel to Colorado to teach, I can pick her brain about Norwegian tapestry weaving. This is yarn I’m hanging onto for the present. The yarn is Frid Vevgarn from Norsk Fjord Fiber in Florida.

Other sources of special yarns

There are so many ways I collect bits of fiber. I have received gifts of spinning fiber and sometimes yarn from students and vendors. Sometimes it is something I just can’t use and then I donate it, but often it strikes a cord. I remember when one of my long-term tapestry students Beth who is a fantastic spinner realized I was just learning to spin. She sent me a fiber care package of smallish amounts of beautiful roving and top. Just recently I found a little packet of silk yarns from a student sent a few years back that are the perfect thing for a tapestry diary piece. Claudia Chase from Mirrix looms loves to test her little silk bundles out on me and I will never complain about that—they’re beautiful. And over the years I’ve taken various workshops where I’ve dyed or made yarn in small amounts that still hangs on in the stash because the memory of the event was so lovely.

The image below is a skein of indigo from a natural dye class taught by Liesel Orend in Española, NM many years ago now. It is half a pound of tapestry yarn and I hang onto it because I believe I will use it one day. Also, Liesel was an amazing teacher and I wanted to take more classes from her but she moved away.

Indigo dyed tapestry yarn from a natural dye workshop with Liesel Orend in Española, NM.

EPiC (Excellent Production in Craft) and it’s founder

I will admit that this particular yarn feels special to me because I had some email exchanges from the founder of the original company before she died. Mary Ann Beinecke, known mostly as MAB, sent me a healthy collection of small skeins of her yarn as I was preparing to teach at Convergence in Providence, RI in 2014. The yarn was developed as a needlework yarn. I is 18/2 and 4800 yards per pound. It is quite similar to weaversbazaar fine in weight, but it is more loosely plied. Some of the colors are intentionally varied in value which gives the yarn a hand-dyed feel. It is now sold by Timeless Textiles as MAB passed away not long after I corresponded with her.

I wrote THIS blog post about the yarn in 2015 and though it is five years later, I’m back to your yarn MAB. I got the full color palette from the new company owner and used it in my Listen piece recently. This is a special yarn and I will use it and remember strong women like MAB who started her own company in the 60s, wrote books, taught an embroidery correspondence course, worked on redeveloping North Adams, MA (home of my publisher and Mass MOCA), was an advisor for the arts to Gov. Dukakis and Sen. Kennedy, started another business selling this yarn. I’m pretty sure we would have gotten along. Thanks for all your work changing the world for fiber artists MAB.

And here is the piece I wove using EPiC. The white is another yarn, the colored yarns are EPiC. You can see more about this piece HERE.

Rebecca Mezoff, Listen, 2 x 14 inches, June 2020. — Rebecca Mezoff, *Listen,* 2 x 14 inches, June 2020.

Keep listening and let’s also remember our blessings. I am clearly blessed with a lot of fiber stories so thanks for sticking with me this long to read them.

Tapestry by Alex Marriott, I Am So Blessed. — Tapestry by Alex Marriott, *I Am So Blessed.*

What are your special yarns? The ones with stories that you love? Tell us in the comments.

*Please Americans, I beg you on my knees. Please please please wear a mask and observe social distancing. Please. It is so simple. If we all wear masks we can be done with this far sooner. Otherwise people will continue to die by the thousands (over 1000 every day in the USA now). Wear a mask.

**Don’t judge. I don’t do drugs and I barely drink. Yarn ends up being cheaper and making something out of it is a positive thing to do. There are worse habits.

Using our "special" yarns