This week's Long & Short Reviews prompt is "gifts for people who love" something reviewers love enough to be informed about.
Well, I'm a knitter, so...
1. Yarn Kits
Most knitters enjoy yarn itself. We have to remind ourselves not to stockpile too much more yarn than we can knit in a given season, because many of our favorite yarns attract the dreaded carpet beetle and the dreaded clothes moth. (Clothes moths can only eat wool and other animal-hair fibres; carpet beetles can also eat cotton and linen.)
However, knitters usually love having someone buy us enough yarn to make something they want us to knit for them.
Yarn to make elaborate multicolored "Eighties Sweaters" is often available in kits. If you find a "sweater kit" in a wool shop and want to wear the sweater, the kit would be an excellent gift for a knitter.
Smaller, cheaper knitting kits tend to be designed for children and to include craft yarn, but if what you'd like to have knitted for you is a Christmas tree ornament, the kit to make the one that's caught your fancy would still be a nice gift for a knitter.
For a real nonstop knitter, you might even order a subscription to a monthly knitting kit service:
2. Plain Yarn
Knitters' imagination is not limited to kits. In fact some knitters don't want to knit an exact copy of someone else's design. Some knitters would prefer to receive a box of yarn and decide, with the person for whom they're knitting if that's not themselves, what to make of it.
Knitters who prowl secondhand stores eagerly buy, and would appreciate receiving as gifts, sacks of other people's leftover yarn. These can be very cheap and become super-profitable. I once paid less than $8 for a few bags of Rowan Silkstones yarn, which came with a price of about $8 per two-ounce skein stamped on the label of each skein. I knitted it into a very arty-looking jacket and sold it for about $800.
More often, yarn sold at a deep discount is unsalable junk the store wants to get out of people's sight, but some knitters enjoy the challenge of making some use even from nasty spun-plastic yarn--maybe as dog blankets for an animal shelter?
Special Yarns Knitters Love
The more you know about what makes these yarns special, the easier it will be to choose one for the knitter you know. Some yarns are just madly popular with knitters!
3. Schoolhouse Press
Elizabeth Zimmermann taught knitting, sold wool, wrote books, and organized Knitting Camps in an abandoned one-room schoolhouse. Her children and grandchildren have kept the business going. Millions of knitters refer to EZ's books for guidance on knitting and designing, feel as if EZ were a friend of their grandmother's (which she may well have been), and enjoy using the yarns she bought and sold. They're all delicious, mostly soft-colored or undyed wools with enough lanolin to make knitting with them feel like a moisturizing treatment for the hands.
4. Philosophers' Wool
What's hard to see in the photo is that each of these colored yarns is actually a mix of two or three closely related colors that gives the yarn and resulting fabric a distinctive, rich look. Again, the yarns are fairly natural, with plenty of lanolin, and feel pleasant in the knitter's hands. They feel rough but, on a cold night, that rough woolly texture feels wonderfully warming around your neck and ears.
The philosophers were Ann and Eugene Bourgeois, whose biography is at the business web site. They willed the business to a sustainable agriculture group. It's about the dear little sheep who actually like having their coats trimmed when the weather gets warm! "Wool allergies" are usually not allergies to sheep themselves (that can happen, rarely) but sensitivities to acid used to clean many wool materials and sometimes other chemicals used to dye them and reduce shrinkage. Philosophers Wool is one of the more natural wools that are so much easier for most people to wear.
5. Peace Fleece
They originally spun fleece from Russian and American sheep together while awaiting, and then celebrating, the end of the Cold War. Currently they spin Navajo wool together with non-Navajo US mohair. Once again, the yarns are natural and feel like snuggling a pet lamb.
6. Virtual Yarns
Alice Starmore was a fashion designer whose use of fairisle knitting was not traditional...she had too much fun with it. She "retired" enough to run her own little yarn business with her daughter. Real
"Eighties" knitters, and 1990s knitters likewise, adored her masterpiece designs. When you knitted and wore something from one of AS's pattern books, people knew you were a serious knitter. Virtual Yarns still sells AS patterns and real Scotch Hebridean wools.
"Eighties" knitters, and 1990s knitters likewise, adored her masterpiece designs. When you knitted and wore something from one of AS's pattern books, people knew you were a serious knitter. Virtual Yarns still sells AS patterns and real Scotch Hebridean wools.
7. Wool2Dye4
They have a wide selection of undyed yarn, including some good cottons and other alternatives to wool. Some knitters, and some people who commission hand kniting, are allergic to chemical dyes. These yarns come in natural white and sometimes shades of brown and gray. You can dye the white yarns with indigo, madder, and garden weeds or with Kool-Aid powder if you like.
I think five specific brands are enough, but knitters for whom you shop can probably recommend twenty more.
8. Books
Knitters usually like to look at pattern books and magazines. Every knitter has per own opinions about which books are and are not worth the usually high price for the full-color pictures on glossy paper. Books by Elizabeth Zimmermann, Meg Swansen, Annette Mitchell, Kaffe Fassett, Alice Starmore, Helene Rush, Alexis Xenakis And The Staff of Knitter's Magazine, Priscilla Gibson-Roberts, Nicky Epstein, and Anna Zilboorg are worth their price to most knitters.
9. Accessories
Various accessories, from cheap plastic rings to use as markers through hand-carved wooden needle holders, are sold as gifts for knitters. The individual knitter for whom you're buying a gift may or may not have any use for these gadgets. Ask before buying a really expensive one.
10. Space
Some knitters would like to receive the gift of their family's respect for their craft, but this web site is not going to be vile and end with a warble about your thoughts counting as a gift. For gift-giving occasion purposes, only material gifts count. You can, however, make it easier for knitters to store and display their supplies (and products) with the gift of a storage system--deep shelves for storing kits, sturdy bookshelves for storing patterns, a nice bound journal for the notes on their knitting that most modern knitters take.
(Photo credit: Nimble Needles.)
Why not do that at home? It's pretty, its tidy, it's safe...it's actually great insulation...and, if all that yarn is natural material, and it just lives in your house instead of being displayed for sale and sold, it's guaranteed to attract moths and beetles. It will work, though, if the knitter in your family works with (wool shops like Nimble Needles absolutely hate this idea) acrylic craft yarns. Nothing really eats them, though mice have been known to nest in acrylic yarn.
For storing wool, the Greenest alternative is a nice clean freezer, free from food odors.
For storing manageable quantities of wool and cotton yarn, cedar chests were traditional, but they weren't necessarily ideal for the yarn. Plastic totes are serviceable, but if temperatures change they'll form dew and you'll be storing yarn in water. Metal storage drums have the same drawback. Cardboard boxes in the closet work well, in a reasonably controlled indoor "climate" with a competent cat, for any yarn purchased in advance of the working projects knitters like to store in proper knitting bags.
(Photo from Etsy.)
Any large lightweight bag can be used to carry knitting projects around; knitters can knit their own bags (lined with heavy woven fabric), but a proper knitting bag stands beside chair, couch, or bed on a wooden frame,and has room for yarn, needles, as much of the project as has been knitting, instructions, and whatever the knitter is reading while person knits. Every knitter needs at least one of these.
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