Erin: November 2007 Archives

The holidays are a really bad season for knitting blogs - everyone is working on things they can't share because they're gifts. I'm no different - I've got three gifts going at once and nothing I can blog! Just the Tangled Yoke Cardigan, which still looks a lot like a big blob with a lot of dangling yarn bits.

The store is recovering from the weekend. The last batch of orders were shipped out this morning, and we've re-ordered at all of our suppliers, who have been very accomodating! Most of our yarns should be back in stock by the end of the week, and I've taken the opportunity to add some new yarns to the shop - we'll be adding Claudia Handpainted Yarn Silk Lace and Linen as well as Lorna's Laces Shepherd Worsted. And as soon as our J. Knits order arrives, we'll have those in the shop as well, and over the weekend our Two Ply Two stitch markers arrived so we'll get up this week. Jennifer is a friend of mine, and her stitch markers are the best - she made me two sets during Secret Pal 10, and they are by far my favorites. I loved these monkey stitch markers she made me so much that she's made another set (and a set of dogs and cats) for us to put in the store!

The only conundrum left to deal with is that we are completely out of boxes! Small priority mail boxes, that is. So if your orders this week show up in much larger boxes than you'd expect, it's because we went through 150 boxes this weekend, not including all of the first class mailers and large boxes. We are at the mercy of the post office to get more in, and in the mean time I'm begging for boxes at all of the local post offices.

Wow, y'all are really keeping us busy over here! About halfway through the day, I had to call in reinforcements just to keep my head above water with all of the orders coming in, and as a lot of you have already noticed, we are really low on stock now - re-orders were placed last week and are on the way (plus our first shipment of J. Knits should be here next week), but we just didn't expect so much yarn to go so quickly!

Because I haven't had time to sit down and send out shipment e-mails, here is the general status update:

If your order was placed before 2 PM (EST - we're in Atlanta, GA), did not need to be wound, and was domestic U.S. mail (and one military base!), your order has shipped and should hopefully arive at your door by Monday. We also shipped out all of the international orders that came in before 8 AM, but since those have to be hand-delivered to the post office during business hours, orders after that are packaged and ready to go out tomorrow.

We're working on the yarn winding now, so those and the international orders plus as much as possible of what came in after 2 PM should go out in the first batch tomorrow. I'll update this as we move it along.

Another store-related note - when you place an order at Eat.Sleep.Knit, a "pending" charge will immediately show up on your credit card - we have not charged your credit card at this point. We do not ever charge your credit card until after we have actually shipped your order (in fact, it is illegal to do so, but I know some vendors do, unfortunately), and we will adjust the actual charge with the surprise discount you received. If you have cancelled your order or had a problem with credit card verification, please do not be concerned - we have not charged your card and will not do so. Unfortunately, there is no way to get rid of the "pending" charge from our end; the only remedy is to just wait a few days (I have tried this experiment with my own card and assure you it is true!).

Thanks for making our Black Friday sale a huge success!

Eat.Sleep.Knit will be having a "Black Friday Surprise Sale" tomorrow, November 23rd (Black Friday - makes sense, no?). You do not have to subscribe to the newsletter to participate.

How it works:
Starting at 7 AM EST, visit the store and pick out your purchases. You'll go through the checkout process as usual, enter your shipping/billing information, and click on "Complete Order." Your order confirmation page will then display your personal surprise discount and your order total will be adjusted accordingly! All orders will receive a discount of at least 10%, all the way up to 100% (that means your order could be free!). You could win half off, 30% off, 75% off, but no matter what, you will receive at least 10% off and the odds of getting more are quite good! The sale will end at midnight EST on Friday.

We're working on several exciting things and getting some new product lines in that I can't wait to share with you guys! It's not quite time yet though; in the mean time we've added some new colors of Claudia Handpainted Yarn fingering weight, including several of the semi-solids. My three favorites:

Blue Terracotta

Honey

Teal

In knitting news, I finally made it to the yoke of the Tangled Yoke Cardigan this weekend! Nothing really to show since right now it just looks like a jumble of green stockinette, but once I start the Celtic chart maybe I can actually share a picture of it.

First can I just say that I love how you guys are sharing the Smooshy? I have seen this yarn sell out from other shops in a matter of hours, and there are some colors that everyone seems to stay perpetually out of stock of online, so I wasn't sure what would happen when these went up. I'm sure you didn't all get together and coordinate your purchases, but by some twist of fate you are all ordering different colors! Fun for me because I get to pull out all of the colors and fun for you because you don't have to see that sad little "Out of Stock" message on the colors menu (and you get your Dream in Color Smooshy fixes).

Buying yarn online can be a little bit tricky, because you never know if the color is exactly like it is in the picture, if the yarn is as soft as you hope, how it will knit up or drape or even if it is the right weight! I once bought five balls of a "worsted weight" yarn for a tank top from an online-shop-that-shall-remain-nameless, only to receive it and find that it was actually thinner than some of my sock yarn, and the ball band actually listed it as DK weight. I doubled the yarn to get gauge and, needless to say, ran out of yarn halfway through the project.

So here is what you should know about me, your Eat.Sleep.Knit steward, in charge of picking what yarns we carry, describing the yarns, photographing the yarns, and displaying them on the website: I am a bonafide yarnaholic. I am head over heels for yarn (much to my husband's chagrin). It takes a certain amount of effort to remain professional when Lorna's Laces calls saying they're about to ship me 30 pounds of yarn and is that okay. (Okay, true confessions time - I may have been a little more exuberant than professional; have you ever seen a box filled with 30 pounds of yarn?) I will never tell you something is soft unless it is really, truly soft. I spend painstaking hours trying to get each photograph as close to the precise colorway as possible (picture this: it's midnight and I'm in the office with a skein of yarn pressed up against the screen, squinting back and forth from yarn to photo tweaking the color balance). When you order more than one skein of a handpainted yarn (which vary so much from skein to skein), I'll always give you the skeins that are the most closely matched. I knit and I love on my yarn as much (maybe more!) than you do, and I will not sell you something I wouldn't be proud to have in my own stash or next project (because of this, being in proximity to so much beautiful yarn can be very dangerous, especially when I get a little giddy off whatever Claudia scents her yarn with).

Most importantly, if you have questions about a yarn or a project, please ask! You can ask here or on the contact form or send me an e-mail (hint: it's my first name at our URL). I was a knitter and fiber enthusiast long before I opened a yarn shop, and I am more than happy to give you yarn advice and knitting help (or maybe you just want a cheery e-mail - we're happy to send you one of those, too).

Thanks to everyone who took part in our just-for-fun "Up Late" sale last night! We had great fun packing your orders up in the middle of the night, and they all went out this morning! Happy knitting!

I am as surprised as you are - our initial order of Dream in Color Smooshy arrived tonight, and is now available for purchase! Those of you waiting on Fatty and Classy, don't worry - they are being shipped separately and will arrive between now and December.

Take a look at some of these fabulus colors!

Blue Lagoon: An incredibly vivid teal with subtle purples and greens; I think this one might be my favorite!

Wisterious I had never seen this color in person, and it's incredibly whimsical - a light, delicate purple that's not gaudy nor too pastel:

Black Parade: Black Parade is worth mentioning because it is the kind of black other black yarns wish they could be, and perfect for men's garments (at least if you have a husband/significant other who is as opposed to wearing color as mine). It is very definitely black, but there are gentle variations from gray to brown that soften it up.

Chinatown Apple This color reminds me of fall foliage the way it moves from ambers and browns to pinky reds and apple greens; I may have to snag some of this one for myself:

What's your favorite?

Finally some knitting! With the store opening, I've been spending most of my "free" time for the past month either filling orders or working on improvements to the store, so I decided to take the night off and relax.

All of my current WIPs are time-consuming projects - I seem to have a penchant for knitting multiple sweaters at a time on tiny yarn, and I'm still on Clue 5 of the Mystery Stole - so I decided to cast on for a quick pair of socks - Charade (free downloadable pattern) in Claudia Short Sport in the Ingrid's Blues colorway.

The pattern is nice - simple, easy to memorize, but with enough interest that it's fun to knit, but the yarn? Love. It's easy to love a sportweight sock yarn - the photo above is maybe an hour of knitting - but this yarn surprises me everytime I use it. I think of it as a "basic" sort of handpainted sock yarn (if you can call handpaints basic!) - superwash wool, no added fibers or unique textures, but then I start knitting with it and I Never. Want. To Stop. It is so soft and so knittable, and then there is the occasional waft of whatever lovely scent Claudia adds to her yarns when she's dyeing them. I'm totally thinking sweater! Though I'm not sure I need to be knitting three sweaters at once, nevermind three sweaters on US 3's.... In store news, while I was enjoying my sock, my husband added an exciting new feature for the shop - frequent shopper's credit! For every $200 you spend in the store, you'll earn $20 of store credit towards a future order. For those of you who have already ordered, you will get credits retroactively though I have to enter them in manually so it may take me a few days to get everyone's account up to date!

As some of you have already noticed, we got our order of Lorna's Laces in - we have 16 colors of Lion & Lamb and 21 colors of Shepherd Sock in stock now, including a few of the solids! Just as a reminder, newsletter subscribers get a store-wide 10% discount for the entire month of November as a thank you to our loyal customers.

We are also excited to announce that we will be adding J. Knits to our list of vendors - over the next four weeks, we should be getting yarns in stock from several of their gorgeous lines, including the new Charming and Baby Me Camel yarns!

Both of these yarn companies are good examples of a conundrum I've faced a lot in opening Eat.Sleep.Knit - do I focus on a couple of yarn lines so we can stock more of these phenomenal colorways, or do I instead spread the yarn love around a little bit, giving you guys access to more types of yarn but fewer colors? I've worked really hard to try to strike a good balance, and of course we'll be adding more yarn lines and more colors as the shop grows, but I value input from every one of you about what you'd like to see more of, which yarns you can't find anywhere, and which colors you're really bummed that we don't carry. We'll always do our best to get the yarns (and patterns! and notions! and eventually, needles!) you want in stock, so please don't hesitate to send us an e-mail and give us your thoughts.

Congratulations to Fay for winning a skein of Schaefer Heather in our first contest, and to Steph, Nancy, Emily, and AnnaMarie, who will all get a $5 credit towards a future order for their name suggestions! I don't have your e-mail addresses, so please e-mail them or comment with your username and I will get those out to you. Look for your names to appear on our Schaefer Heather page in the next day or two.

Our second contest winner is Star, whose guess of 696 was the closest entry - on Wednesday, the store had 829 skeins of yarn in stock. Since then, we've shipped out quite a bit of yarn, but our backordered Schaefer Judith and Miss Priss came in today, and our Lorna's Laces shipment should be arriving in the next few days. Congratulations to all the contest winners, and thanks to everyone who stopped by the store this first week.

My best friend came down from Pittsburgh to visit this weekend, and we had a blast filling all of your orders and photo-ing new inventory to add to the site. She went home this evening with a carry-on bag full of yarn and SOAK minis and a newfound love of raglan seams, which is how every weekend should go, really.

In the mean time, I'm working on the Tangled Yoke Cardigan from the Fall issue of Interweave Knits - I finished the body a few weeks ago and have been slowly knitting away at the sleeves ever since trying to get to the yoke so I can see the magic of Eunny's twisted sideways cables. It's fairly slow going though, because I decided to magic loop the sleeves instead of using DPNs - does anyone else find that magic loop, while sometimes useful, really slows you down?

Wow, is it Saturday already? The week has flown by with so many orders to fill and new things going on at the shop. Thanks to everyone who has been a part of our first week in business, we are really excited to provide you with the best online yarn shopping experience possible.

Saturday also means our week-long grand opening sale is almost over - order before Sunday at midnight Eastern time to get 25% off everything in the store! As many of you have already noticed, our shipment of SOAK came in, and 14 ounce bottles, 4 ounce bottles, mini-packs, and the limited edition Scent for Celebration are all available in the store now.

We also have our backordered colors of Miss Priss and Judith arriving on Monday, and we will honor the grand opening price on those yarns through Tuesday since they were not available this week.

Both of the grand opening contests are open until Sunday night, and I am really enjoying reading all of your color names! Remember, in addition to the lucky winner of the free skein of yarn, everyone whose color name is used on the site gets a $5 store credit, in addition to having your very own yarn color you got to name, so keep on submitting entries!