Doing production knitting to sell items at a craft show requires a constant source of less expensive yarns. It requires a professional knitter to also be a professional yarn buyer.

Forced To Be a Professional Yarn Buyer

Celeste (of CrankCraftSox) is a perfect example. She’s the craft show vendor friend of mine who sells hand-cranked socks. She makes her socks with a lot of beautiful self-striping, wool/nylon yarns. And she sells them for $30 a pair. Which is astounding to me. Especially when most decent sock yarns retail for around $20. I like her socks so well, that I bought a couple pairs earlier this month at the craft show.

I asked her how she can afford to sell them for $30. And she told that she has gotten extremely good at buying inexpensive yarn. You’d never know it from her display of socks. It’s all really beautiful, top-quality sock yarn.

She is also incredibly talented at making socks on her circular sock knitting machines. So, she obviously does well at the craft shows.

Trying My Hand At Yarn Buying

I use sock yarn for a very different purpose. But I use a lot of it in my craft show items.

An advertisement came into my e-mail for a close-out sock yarn at $3.20 a ball. And the colors looked really nice. My first thought was that it was acrylic or cotton. It wasn’t…it was 75% wool and 25% nylon. My second thought was that it was 50 gram balls (which still would have been a decent price at $6.40 for a 100 grams). But no…they were 100 gram balls! I bought 3 dozen balls of the yarn. The feature photo is what arrived in the mail. Here are the six different colorways I purchased.

Suffice it to say, I’ll be working with this yarn for quite a while. And even though I have been busy making hats for this weekend’s show, I had to start something with the new sock yarn. To see how it knits up!

This is one of those designs (Close To You Shawl) that gets wider and wider as you go along. So the self-striping gets less and less pronounced. The judges are still out on whether this yarn will work well with this type of shawl. Could you imagine if I could produce a small shawl for sale that only cost $3.20 in yarn?!?!

Current Knitting

I was able to finish three additional West Coast Watch Caps since Monday.

The two on the outside (or top two in the righthand photo) are Noro Kureyon (like most of the hats I’ve knit). But the one with the bright orange brim is a different Noro yarn, Noro Kureopatora.

It’s also all wool, but it’s a DK weight with much longer color stripes. So I make that hat in the helical technique taking yarn from the start and end of the ball to get the striping effect. While most of my West Coast Watch Caps are priced at $19, the Kureopatora hats will be priced at $25 since they take longer to make.

Just two more hats to make. And then pricing them all and adding them to my inventory.