Falling into Yarn

Every Fall, we order too much yarn. We have been open 5 years, and this pattern has not changed--ever. It is mostly my fault, I admit; I always find yarn that we need. But I'll blame Kim for maybe 25 percent of it. She says that hey, when we're ordering and I get yarn I want, she should be able to get yarn she wants.

Our rationales, as compelling as they are, do not solve the underlying problem of where we are going to put the yarn when it arrives.

Last week, we got our first fall delivery. We got 6 very huge boxes. I was out when they arrived, and Kim reacted by telling me that she had put all the boxes under the table, and I could deal with them by myself when I got back. She always says that. I wasn't a bit scared.

I got back. We started by pulling out all the yarn and piling it on the back table, since the boxes had random mixtures of different types of yarn:

We had piles like this in a lot of places. To give you a sense for just how bad it was, my mother came into the shop when we were in the thick of these piles, said hi, looked around, and then, before we could put her to work, ran out of there as fast as an Olympic gold medalist.

The whole shop had to be moved around. It's fall: The bulky yarn that had been in the back needed to move out front. The cottons had to go from the front to the back. This kind of moving is like switching around whole rooms of stuff in a house. As this completely unposed photo demonstrates, I was tearing my hair out:


And as we kept working, I got very, very tired:

(Don't you think I look like an angel when I'm asleep?)

Fortunately, I didn't do it all alone. Kim put on her serious work shoes to help get the job done:

(Seriously, I can never resist teasing Kim about her shoes, but I have never in my life seen anyone else who can plow through so much work while wearing flip-flops.)

We kept moving yarn around, and around, and by the end of the week, the front area looked like this:


And when Kirsten worked on Saturday, she and I were able to finish things up, get all the yarn off the floor--and even leave some shelf space:

Which we need. Because we know that over the next few months, more yarn is on its way. Enough to fill at least 8 times this much space.

But I'm not a bit scared.

You're getting sleeeeepy.... you're getting sleeeeeeepy.... you neeeeeeed to buy yaaaaaaarn.....