Hello, all. My wife is an excellent knitter. Her fave store in NYC has been A) overpriced even more than ususal lately, and B) really snotty to her. She wants to find suppliers for all qualities of yarn for knitting.
Yes, I know, angry naysayers, I COULD Google for her but it leaves me with no personal experience or references or recommendations. So I turn to the Teeming Millions of Knitters out there.
Please share your favorite supplier, who will sell over the Internet? Thanks in advance for the Straight Dope on good yarn.
After all, there’s nothing like a good yarn. ( groan )
www.patternworks.com has a huge variety of yarns and excellent descriptions. I have never ordered yarn online because I have access to several good local shops, but I use the site all the time for information.
www.smileys.com has some really cheap yarn. The selection is really spotty, but you can get some great deals. It’s located in Queens, so I might take a trip out there someday.
WEBS. (www.yarn.com) is excellent. Also has great sales. Highly recommend them. (I’ve heard it’s even better in person, but I’m obviously too far away to confirm that.)
knitting.about.com also has listings and reviews of yarn shops (disclaimer, yarn stores do have tendency to be weird places. Most are small enough that if you’re a regular customer, the staff knows you well - and most of the people who write into that site are regular customers. Their experience and the experiences of someone walking in off the street are often drastically different.)
I’ll second the suggestion to check out about.com. If you go to the knitting pages, and then go to the forums, you’ll find a whole forum devoted to discussion of yarn. You’ll probably have to do a search to find the right threads (pun intended), but I know there have been several discussions about the various online yarn stores.
I second <A href=“http://www.yarnshoppe.com/”>Herrschners Yarn Shoppe</a>. I’ve also had problems using their website (placed a long and complicated order, only to be told at the last step that my browser, the latest version of Netscape, wasn’t supported–ARGH!!!) but I’ve ordered by mail and by phone tons of times. They’re definitely the place to go for Ye Olde Cheape Acrylic Yarn, and they have quite a good variety of specialty yarns.
I like Allegro Yarns, which is based in Minneapolis. They have my favorite brand of yarn (Lamb’s Pride by Brown Sheep - it’s very simple, good yarn, available in a hundred colors), and their ordering process is simple. If your wife likes fancier yarns, try Dharma Trading in San Rafael, CA. Their store is just fabulous, but because they obviously hate me, they don’t have their yarn catalogue on the internet. I think a paper catalogue is available if you call them, at 800-542-5227. Normally this would be a huge turn-off, but I forgive them because their physical store is just so darned cool.
