Easy Knitting Patterns

fabric.com Deal of the Day

Most of the knitting I do is making gifts for others. And most of those gifts are scarves or afghans because they fit with my philosophy of working easy knitting patterns that I can take with me, that don’t require my total focus, and that I’m likely to actually finish. I also tend to buy nice but inexpensive yarn, in keeping with my frugal living philosophy. My usual place to buy yarn is at my local Michaels store. I am signed up for their weekly emails and I try to plan my purchases to make best use of their sales and coupons. (Sign up here.) But not everyone has access to a local store, and sometimes the store doesn’t carry or has run out of a color I want. So I decided to look at the online options. As I quickly discovered, buying just one or two skeins of yarn online is not a good idea because of the shipping costs. By the time you add shipping, the cost of your one skein could easily be doubled or tripled, especially for an inexpensive yarn. That having been said, buying yarn can be a good deal if you need a lot of it. For example, I took a look around to see where the best deal was to buy yarn for the Cromwell Court afghan I reviewed in my last blog entry (Easy Knitting Pattern Review–Cromwell Court Afghan). That pattern takes eight skeins of Lion Brand Wool-ease Thick & Quick yarn which normally retails for $6.99 to $7.99 per skein. I discovered that fabric.com has the lowest price on shipping of any of the yarn websites I’ve looked at

(that carry Lion Brand Yarn). For example, here is the shipping on orders of up to $9.99 for four yarn suppliers: Yarnsupply.com $7.68 (delivered to South Carolina) Joann.com $5.95 Lionbrand.com $4.10 Fabric.com $3.95 What is even more significant is that fabric.com offers free shipping on orders over $35.00. Also, the price on the yarn itself varies somewhat. So for my 8-skein afghan, here is how the cost breaks down (yarn + shipping = total): Joann.com 8 x $7.99 + $7.95 = $71.87 Lionbrand.com 8 x $6.99 + $8.95 = $64.87 Yarnsupply.com 8 x $6.33 + $8.97 = $59.61 Fabric.com 8 x $6.99 + $0.00 = $55.92 (Note that the lionbrand.com cost drops a bit if you order it in the color they show in their example.) For smaller items, like the baby afghan I described in My Favorite Easy Knitting Pattern for a Baby Blanket, it might make sense to plan to make a number of blankets in different color schemes from the same pattern and to buy all that yarn at one time to get the free shipping. There are a couple of other reasons to choose fabric.com for online yarn purchases. They have a 100% satisfaction guarantee, and they pay for return shipping, in case that’s an issue. Plus they guarantee to ship within 48 hours, and have a frequent shopper program. They don’t have offline locations, so they seem to work a little harder at being responsive to online customers than some of the other sites I visited. I think fabric.com suffers a bit with knitters because they sound like they are just for people who sew or quilt. In fact, when you get to their home page, you have to scroll down a bit to see the “Knitting & Crochet” link. But they do carry several brands of yarn including Berroco, Filatura Di Crosa, Gedifra, Lion Brand, Nashua, Peaches & Cream, Regia, Rowan, S. Charles, and Tahki. In addition to yarn, they carry needles, hooks, accessories, and pattern books. Many people are comfortable with ordering through Amazon.com. If that includes you, please note that, for yarn (plus needles and accessories), you are actually ordering through one of the above suppliers. So even if you normally get free shipping on books from Amazon, that will not be the case for yarn. (Amazon’s free shipping policies do not apply when sales are conducted through third party vendors.) Disclosure: Once I saw what a good offer they had, I became an affiliate of fabric.com. That means I make a small (8%) percentage of your purchase if you click through to fabric.com from my website. I am also an affiliate of amazon.com and I make an even smaller (4%) percentage on your purchase if you click through to amazon.com from my website. I am not an affiliate of any other website mentioned in this article.

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