Choosing Yarn!

Patrick and I met with the Cascade rep today!!  This was our first yarn rep meeting, and it went really well.  Unfortunately, it was a little like trying to drink water from a fire hose!!  So many yarns!  So many colors!

Here are some of the things I learned today:

1. There are about a zillion colors of Cascade 220.
2. I have expensive taste and would order ten times more yarn than we can afford if I didn’t have such a strict budget.
3. Cascade has some really high-end amazing yarns, but they also have some good quality affordable yarns.
4. I still don’t like the color orange.  (Although I did choose some orange because, apparently, there are more people in the world than just me.)
5. It is absolutely necessary for both me and Patrick to meet with the reps. 
   1. We can help each other as we choose yarns and colors. 
   2. As much as we try to communicate all of our thoughts about yarn to each other, there is invariably something one of us has thought about and hasn’t mentioned to the other.
   3. He keeps me grounded in terms of money.  We really can’t have every color of Cascade 220 and all the fancy silk blends.
   4. I have a migraine tonight and it was starting while we were in the meeting.  It’s important to have Patrick there to keep me from getting too overwhelmed, which is most likely to happen when I’ve got (or am getting) a migraine.
6. A $3000 budget goes away very, very quickly!!

We didn’t actually put in the order today – we’ll do it in a couple of weeks.  In the meantime, we’ll be meeting with some other reps and figuring out what other yarns we want and finalizing what we want from Cascade.

Patrick and I also did some talking about the structure of the shop this afternoon.  We haven’t purchased any of our fixtures yet, and we’re trying to get as much as we can used.  For example, we are putting the sofa from my mother-in-law’s house next door (that she rented for the last year – she’s giving up that place and will just stay with us or friends when she visits and she’ll keep her primary residence in Florida) in the front room instead of the back room as we’d originally planned.  We want to have a place where people can feel free to sit and knit and chat.  It’s also a good place where someone can knit up a bit of yarn to decide if they want to buy it.

We’ve got lots of other great ideas for the building.  I’m looking forward to it looking like a “real” yarn shop!

Next time: Fair Isle sweater progress!