"Green" ideas for St. Patrick's Day

Today I'm working on our next bulk email, that should go out toward the end of this week. We'll be featuring green yarns... not the color green, but the organic green. If you're not signed up for our weekly newsletter, sign up here. It's the only way you'll know about our unadvertised specials & sales.

We love to re-use shipping boxes when shipping internet orders. If you have a perfectly good box, why not re-use it? Last week I had the pleasure of sorting through over 150 boxes of Girl Scout Cookies that Helen and Sophie had sold. They all come in these great cardboard boxes, and I was able to use all 13 of ours to ship orders last week. The troop leader called me last night and said she has another 13 for me. So consider yourself a part of the Kaleidoscope Yarns re-use program if you are lucky enough to get your order in a GS cookie box.

And while we're talking about "green" things, we've given out almost 300 bag credits so far, since we started doing them just a short while ago. Thanks to all of you who are participating by bringing in your own bags for your purchase.


We have several "green" bag making classes coming up if you want to make your own bag. The first is a crochet shopping bag - which is a beginner's class. Crochet is becoming much more popular and you really only need to know the basics to make this cute bag. Barb is going to whip one up as an example - and we plan to use the Tahki Cotton Classic, since we're going to make it multi-color, and they have such a great range of colors. Of course Saucy would also work nicely for this bag.


Then yesterday she was looking through the Crocheted Pursenalities book and she found the CUTEST little patchwork crocheted/then felted bag! So she took home some Cascade 220 and started it last night. It's SO easy, and adorable. She's off today, but when she comes in tomorrow, we'll look at the calendar and schedule a beginner class for that one, too.

One more noteworthy "green" topic - we recently started carrying Ecologico by Schachenmayr. This is a lovely heavy worsted weight yarn that's 100% untreated virgin wool. It has a unique "homespun" look. The labels on this yarn are recyclable and the yarn comes to us in brown paper bags. So a lot less plastic overall, and that's a good thing.

Each color is a combination of two natural wool shades and it knits up beautifully. It's so unbelievably soft - you can sort of tell just from touching the ball, but it really is lovely to knit, and it blocks beautifully. See?