I received some sad news a little while ago. In about a month ~ November 15, 2014, one of my favorite websites for yarn and free patterns will no longer exist. Elann.com is closing its website and brick and mortar warehouse, and moving all its yarns to Amazon.com (us, ca, and a few other Amazon sites). I absolutely hate this. Hate it!
I love Amazon. I am a Prime member. Have been for years. But I love Amazon for its books. I don't buy anything else from Amazon, for the most part. An occasional CD, or I watch a movie on the site, but it is overwhelmingly my source for books.
I'm not sure if this move means that Elann will no longer be producing their "tasting and testing" yarns. I've bought a ton of those, and I love them. They are made exclusively for Elann, and they come with a lot of information you don't find on a regular yarn tag ~ micron count, for instance. And Elann takes our feedback on these yarns to decide if they should keep or let go of these yarns. How could that work on Amazon?
When I first started buying yarn online, Elann was the only place I could find great yarn. They would send samples of the yarns coming up for the next month, so you could hold them in your hand, knit them up in small swatches. (you had to pay for a subscription for this, but it was so worth it!) You got credits for buying (knitting) books, which you could use to discount your yarn purchases. And every $500 spent there got you a $50 gift certificate. Yah, I know it's only 10%, but it was still a kick when their tally hit the number, and you got told you now had $50 to spend on anything. They also did a random drawing, and the person who won got a gift certificate for however they'd spent during that month. I won once, and I never win anything!
They shipped everything US Priority Mail, so the wait was never very long. They offered a chat room (pre-Ravelry) where you could drop in and chat about knitting and just about everything else (minus politics and religion, of course). Just a couple of months ago I used their "Desperately Seeking" feature to find a skein of yarn I needed for a sweater, and the person who responded actually worked there, had exactly the skein I needed, and sent it to me (from Canada to So. California) for free, just asking that I would pay it forward some day. How do I do that once their site no longer exists?
I am just so totally bummed that they are going. I am seriously going to miss them. They offered terrific discounts on yarn, had their own delicious line of yarns, offered so many perks for shopping there. I wish there was something I could do to keep them operating on their own, and not become part of the monolithic Amazon reality. With the world of knitting growing so enthusiastically, I don't understand the logic of this move. They could have raised their prices a bit if it was the economy (Is Canada's economy tanking?). Charged a bit more for shipping, because I am sure they undercharged for it. ($5 for shipping 15 skeins of wool from Canada (or Washington state, where they have/had another warehouse) to SoCal? I don't think so. Ann and Robert Cannon-Brown are terrific people, and I'm sad to see them go. I wish them all the joy and happiness in the world, while I mourn the passing of their company and website.
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