More orders placed!

With our store location coming together and our online store launching soon we'll be placing quite a few orders for inventory over the next couple of weeks. Yesterday we placed an order to expand our selection of yarns from Rowan and placed our first order with Manos del Uruguay!

First up, Rowan. We ordered the six new Fall 2014 colors and doubled up on some others from that company's Pure Wool Worsted collection. I've been enjoying working on a sampler scarf in Jade (#127). When it's all in we'll have 56 shades to choose from...along with a really cool life-sized sheep display to show off the collection. If you can't tell, we're excited about the sheep. We're also excited about the Martin Storey designs in Simple Shapes Pure Wool Worsted, which we'll have on hand to show what you can do with this excellent, affordable yarn.

Next, we purchased a small selection of Rowan's Fine Lace, made from baby suri alpaca and fine merino wool. We chose six lovely shades (Aged, Cameo, Era, Gunmetal, Quaint, and White) to start but may look to expand that as we see how it is received.

We ordered eight shades of Kidsilk Haze in two palettes and hope to show it off with a couple of scarves (see pictures below, right) that show off the palettes working together. In green we have Forest Green, Fern, Jelly, and Alhambra. In purples we have Blackcurrant, Liqueur, Blood, and Splendour.

Closer to winter we're looking at getting in some Alpaca Chunky, for which Rowan has some excellent patterns including hats, cowls, and other accessories. We're also looking at Rowan's Pure Wool DK and may put some on order if our customers think it's something we should carry. So. We put it to you: What do you think of these products?

Now, let's talk about Manos! First off we've got Alegria sock yarn, made from 75% superwash merino and 25% polyamide for improved wear. We'll have five beautiful colorways of this: Butia, Carnaval (fun!), Fondo del mar, Malvin, and Tannat.

Then we'll have Deep Sea and Terrain from Manos' awesome Serena line. This 60% baby alpaca and 40% pima cotton blend has a great feel and is very versatile. We hope you like it because there are so many more lovely shades in the collection and we'd like to stock more of this!

We'll also carry an initial selection of ten shades of Silk Blend:  Adobe, Arctic Shadow, Aster, Deep Sea, Lava, Oxblood, Pine, Tomato, Violets, and one other I can't seem to locate on the Manos site at the moment. Five of the choices above are semi-solid colors and the other five are multi-colored. This yarn blends 30% silk with 70% superfine merino wool and the colors are just beautiful!

Finally, we'll have Velvet and Esmerelda from Manos' new Franca line. We'll see how this does but there are some more tasty selections in the Franca palette we'd like to stock in the future.

And that's all the product news we have for now but hopefully it whets your appetites! For the rest of this week we'll be doing boring stuff like getting estimates for work on the store and figuring out what improvements we can make ourselves and buying insurance. We'll also be doing the gruntwork required to get our web store up and running and open that up for a limited "beta test" with a few customers. Next week, however, it's back to ordering more yarn! We've got some more great stuff on our list so stay tuned.