Vintage love: Vanessa

All too often on the blog i'm exclaiming about the yarns we stock from all around the world. One local yarn may be a humble price in comparison to the others, but we are having a love affair with it. Who better to talk about this adoration than you, our lovely customers? 

Vintage DK is entirely processed right here in NZ, and we're lucky to be one of very few stores to have it on the shelves. This yarn is so popular in-store that we don't sell it online, however we are most happy to take email orders.

Thanks so much to Vanessa for this beautifully thought-out post. 

aaahhh Vintage…

Vintage. I have knitted nearly everything with it. So plump, so soft, so versatile – I could wax lyrical for quite some time.

So I will.

Back in the very early 1980’s, I was inducted into that special club that most of my friends were - the one where Nana teaches you to knit a misshapen scarf with yarn that burned your fingers with the acrylic content as you had your tension so tight; your hands would sweat and your tongue was poised in the oh so attractive concentration mode and you buried every ounce of time into that thing until your mum rescued you and took you to the movies to see ET. I must have been 7.

I didn’t pick the sticks up again until I was pregnant with my third (what a waste of baby knitting opportunity). Here’s where my totally normal and harmless addiction started. Anyway, I joined Ravelry; ditched the straight needles in favour of circulars and was soon burning through so much wool it was getting a bit.. well, ridiculous. This wool was matched to my budget – nearly always wool, but always $5.00 and under while I was taking a break from working full time. I started searching for an alternative to the dreaded Spotlight trips with 2 tiny and packed-with-hideous-potential boy children.

I found Skeinz online. I spent a lot of time browsing the yarn, and ordered a pile of it to try. In that pile, I got 6 balls of Vintage in ‘Cadet’. Said yarn arrived. Love ensued. I cast it on straight after the package arrived, and never had I enjoyed the process so much. That thing was finished in just a few days.

I ordered more. And visited the Skeinz store in person. Picked up balls of it when at the HRYC on a Wellington visit. Felt guilty when looking in my stash at all the unloved other wool in there. Knitted some unloved stuff up so I could buy more Vintage. Tried an overseas yarn that everyone raved about and wasn’t in raptures like everyone else- for the press it had got, I was expecting yarn twice as soft as Vintage, since it was more than twice the price. Not even.

So, what’s it made of? It’s soft as some merino in my opinion. No other yarn comes as close for me (I love the way it looks but I’m a tactile person – and I don’t love machine washable yarn in its squeaky, stretchy and to me, polystereny handle, or the really rough, sheepier, scratchier stuff). The colours are bang on – softer and more sepia than most. I’ve gifted it. Made many, many clothes for my 3 boys from it. Hats and scarves and even finished a ‘Rocky Coast’ in it for me – that is being worn to death.

(looking gorgeous, Vanessa!)

So what’s next? Shall I get all exotic and try more overseas yarns now I’m back at work full time with a legitimate budget for yarn? Shall I jump out of my comfort zone and go for some of those brighter, clearer superwash dye jobs that look so pretty in other peoples projects? Or shall I pester Skeinz until they do a fingering and a sport range of Vintage in some greenish blues and marled greys? I’d be absolutely sorted then. So, whoever the tactile angel is who is in charge of making that fleece so gorgeously strokable and knittable; the visual artist who makes those vivid but muted colours that are so perfect to my eye – thank you. Keep on doing it!