One of my biggest challenges with the shop is keeping up with e-mails, as some of you know - I am always doing eight things at once and frequently will start an e-mail conversation, get busy, and somehow never finish it, and that is just in my personal life! I try to be better about this with business e-mails, but sometimes when we're trying to get orders out the door and the new yarn phtographed and catalogued and dealing with returns or the bank, e-mails that aren't as "urgent" slip through the cracks. In the spirit of that, I thought I would answer some of the most frequently asked questions here (and maybe I should add these to the FAQ page, what do you think?).
When are you getting in more of <insert gorgeous out of stock yarn here>?
The answer to this is always "as soon as we can." We always re-order any colors and/or yarns that are out of stock or rapidly getting there, and we place re-orders all the time, often as soon as the first order gets here, we're on the phone placing another, and with a few we will have two pending at once. Because all of the yarns we carry are hand-dyed, it can take anywhere from one week to four months to get an order in, depending on what the dyer's schedule is like at that moment. We have no idea exactly when they will be restocked until we get a phone call saying the order is shipping - and even when we're given a timeframe, I'm reluctant to tell you all what it is because, honestly? It's usually wrong, sometimes actually by months. I'd hate for you to wait for a yarn, expecting it to be here in two days, and it didn't get here for six weeks.
But, rest assured, if it's in our store, we've ordered more, and will have more in eventually.
What is a "Power Boost yarn?"
Ah, the Power Boost yarns. This is a part of our Yarn Marathon, and it seems to cause lots of confusion. When I came up with the idea for the Yarn Marathon, I quickly realized that the main problem with it is that yarn is typically priced by weight rather than yardage, so for $20, you could buy a skein of laceweight - 1200 yards, sock yarn - 450 yards, worsted weight yarn - 250 yards, or chunky yarn - 100 yards. It was never our intention to put people who prefer heavier gauges at a disadvantage, so we based the Yarnathon prize brackets on the most popular weight of yarn - sock yarn - and created the idea of a "Power Boost" yarn, which would effectively give you a "power boost" in terms of yardage for the Yarnathon prizes.
So, if a yarn is marked as being 200% Power Boost (all of our chunky yarns are right now), that means you get credit for the 100 yards in the skein plus 200% (or, in this example, 200 yards) for a grand total of 300 yards toward your Yarn Marathon rewards. It is important to note that this does not mean we have some sort of magical skeins that actually have three times the yardage in them - your "Power Boost" is strictly on paper. I wish there was a way to link these to the Yarn Marathon page - it seems like there must be, but I haven't found it.
Will there be a new Yarn Marathon in 2009?
We're planning on it! We've greatly enjoyed the Yarnathon, and it seems like you all have to, so we are planning to do a new one in 2009. We've also tossed around the idea of switching up the concept from a Marathon to something weight-based due to the gauge issue, though to be honest we really do love the idea of using all those yards of yarn. If any of you have input or ideas about how to level the playing field a bit more, we'd love to hear them.
