An Indulgence

I want more yarn. I really really want more yarn. In fact, I am willing to buy a whole sweater's worth of yarn, even though I have two sweaters on the needles, a shawl, an afghan, a pair of socks, and the hexipuffs. Oh yeah. You knew that already. It's that none of those are the sweater I really want right now. What I want is grey cotton. 

Last post I mentioned that a machine made sweater had become my favorite, and it was also falling apart. Well, I've been looking at mill ends again. I freaking love mill ends. It started with my Raindrop Cardigan. If you don't know what mill ends are, allow me to explain.

When a yarn company makes yarn they have a bunch of leftover bits that don't fit into the balls and skeins they sell. However, throwing this yarn away can mean a huge loss of money since it can be yards and yards of little bits of yarn. So what companies do is sell mill ends. They tie these leftover bits together and sell it at a discount since there's more knots and occasionally variations in the color where one bit of the dye ran out and changed the color of the yarn before they could stop the machine and put more dye in. This is, incidentally, where the term "oddball" comes from since sometimes you can get an entire ball in the dye lot that is a different color. 

So, yes, there's drawbacks to mill ends. However, there are also some pretty awesome benefits. Like that fact that you can get yarn for a quarter of the usual price. Usually this is really freaking fancy yarn. Yarn that sells for $10 and $12 a skein for $3-$4 a piece. Same yardage, same yarn, same quality. But it's mill ends. It's like a perpetual sale on yarn. 

And now that I'm saying it to myself, I'm on my way online to get more yarn!