My wife has enlisted friends to help me sell her yarn stash if she dies before me. There’s probably 10 large worth of high value lines sitting in bins around me. Her work includes a $200/month yarn shop stipend, and has for many years now.
Comment on surely your hobby can't be that expensive
Rinn@awful.systems 3 weeks agoCrocheting/knitting is cheap to try out but once you really get into it (and start worrying about yarn quality and so on), the money pit opens.
Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de 3 weeks ago
LillyPip@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
Yep. Often when I wear a new jumper or whatever around people who know I knit, I get asked ‘oh, that’s pretty, did you make it?’
Lol no, that would have cost me like 5 times more. I couldn’t afford to make it myself.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
is that just the value of your time or are you considering you’d use the fanciest yarn too?
LillyPip@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
It’s not considering the value of my time; a decent (actually wearable) yarn is far more expensive than most people think.
I would consider it a waste of my time to spend a couple hundred hours on a garment that’s barely wearable because it’s uncomfortable and borderline not washable. That’s what you will get with any yarn that won’t cost you over $50 in materials.
Cheap yarns are fine for beginner projects that aren’t made to be worn, but if you’re putting that much of your effort into a garment meant to be used, you should not be using bargain yarn. Your effort is worth too much to sabotage yourself that way.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
TIL! I want to get my niece some pretty yarn (she’s just getting in to crochet) but i have no idea how to choose. I just go by “ooo pretty” and “ooo soft” and if it scores high on both, i get it for her. so far so good.
IAmNorRealTakeYourMeds@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
ok but that’s in you for getting expensive yarn.
Rinn@awful.systems 3 weeks ago
Nah, honestly anything better than the bottom-of-the-barrel acrylics is going to add up quickly when you buy enough of it to make something like a sweater. If you want to use natural fibers (wool, cotton, I’ll take bamboo too) that’s a large jump in price, even if you’re not getting anything too fancy. And I feel like if I’m going to spend months hand-knitting a sweater, I don’t want to end up with something that’s all plastic and will degrade in a year.
I do also have some fancy hand-dyed yarns that were properly expensive and these ones are indeed 100% on me :P But they’re not really what I’m talking about here.
laurelraven@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Oh yeah, most people just have no clue how much yarn is needed or how much time it takes to make even a fairly simple item
IAmNorRealTakeYourMeds@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I tried getting into knitting once, and really appreciated that the entry bar is so cheap. I never made the jump for more expensive yarn, life got in the way and stopped.
Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
As someone who owns a spinning wheel, you can dye and spin yarn at home to make the money pit even wider and deeper!
JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl 3 weeks ago
Isn’t spinning your own yarn an amount of work that you should be saving money? 😂
Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
It depends.
It isn’t that yarn in itself is expesive, but if you’re knitting/weaving, you’re not doing it to save money on socks, you want to make something cool and unique. If you really get into it, you’re going to eventually want that specialist wool/bamboo/elastane blend with a super specific colour grade and maybe a specific manufacturing method too. And that’s expensive.
Similarly, if you’re spinning your own yarn, you can get boring old for about half the price of boring old yarn, and even less if you dye big batches yourself. You can get a pretty nice wool for about a quarter of the price of the yarn, so far so good. But of course, if you’re spinning your own yarn, you’re going not doing that for production purposes, you want to make something cool and unique. So you’ll want to blend in specifics, like glitter nylons, or maybe even metalic fibers, and that long-fiber, ultra-fine angora will go great with a slightly thicker cairngorn, etc etc. And before you know it, you’re making yarn that costs maybe ten times what they sell at the local hobby shop.
And spinning wheels aren’t exactly cheap either. Mine was something like 800 euros, but you can easily spend four times that on an electric wheel. You can buy a LOT of yarn for that money. And lets not talk about how much wool I’ve ruined due to lack of skill.