Crochet Update Yarn search

At the end of my last post, I mentioned that my first task was to find a source of wool/yarn here in Hyderabad. That took a couple of weeks. We trekked to several different bazaars in search of wool, with mixed success. We found a couple of places that had small amounts of very thin wool, but that wasn’t what I was looking for. We decided to keep looking, but in the meantime we bought some heavy nylon cord to make a new laundry basket. I’ll post about that later, but here’s a sneak preview of the early stages:

Running all over Hyderabad looking for yarn was not a very fun experience. The closest place is more than half an hour’s drive away, and the other ones are more like an hour. Add traffic and it can be even longer, during which we’re sitting on the bike in stop-start traffic breathing in all the fumes from the car and bike exhausts. It isn’t so hot anymore, but it can rain at any time (much like Auckland).

Whenever we go into the city, we try to get as much done as possible. So we ride somewhere, park, walk to wherever we need to go and then get back on the bike and ride to the next place. Things are pretty conveniently grouped, so there is one area that is the mobile phone market, where virtually all the dozens of shops sell mobile phones &ampamp everything related to them. Another suburb has all the computer parts shops. Another has electronics supplies, still another has hardware, and another has motorcycle parts. So once you get to the right area, you park and then walk around from one shop to another to find out which has the thing you want at the right price.

With yarn stores it is even more difficult as there is no ‘yarn suburb’. We found a few places where there are stores selling fabric and sewing supplies where there were rumoured to be stores that sold yarn well, but those are few and far between. We had to go to dozens of places and ask if they have wool or yarn, and the vast majority would say no, but direct us to somewhere else they thought might have it. A lot of the time it felt like a wild goose chase. I don’t like shopping at the best of times, and so I really can’t take more than a few hours of this sort of thing before I get fed up and want to go home.

We did have some success though. The first place we found something had big loops of wool hanging on clotheslines within the shop:

Technically it’s not actually wool, it’s acrylic yarn, but that’s what I wanted. Wool is best if you are going to wear it, but for things like bags, toys, flowers etc, acrylic is more durable, washable and comes in more colours. This place sold wool by the kilo and had three different thicknesses. I wanted the thickest wool, because it is better for the sort of things I want to make. Unfortunately, the colour range was most limited in the thickest wool, so we didn’t buy anything, hoping to find something better elsewhere.

The next place we found was a bit closer in the General Bazaar in Secunderabad. They had small packets of 6 balls per packet, but it was all very thin baby-weight acrylic. There was a decent range of colours though, but the price was more than double the previous place we found.

We found two other places selling these same packets of wool with only slightly better prices and better range, so in the end we ended up going back to the first place we found and buying 2kg of wool (about 30 colours). Here are the fatter yarns that I will use to make a bag:

And here are some of the thinner yarns:

The next step was to turn this into something I could crochet from. The big loop is technically called a hank and trying to use it directly results in a huge tangled mess. You have to put it over the back of a chair to unwind it and then wind it into a ball and use that instead. I’d done the same with my nylon cord, but I wasn’t too happy with my ball winding skills, so I turned to the interwebs for help. I discovered something called a nostepinne, which is basically a tapered wooden rod around which you can wind yarn. Not having one, I improvised with a tube of toothpaste:

And the result was some lovely centre-pull flat-bottomed balls of yarn (shown here with the start of the base of the bag I’m making with them):

This worked pretty well, but I still had about 25 hanks to wind, so I wanted something a bit easier to hold than a tube of toothpaste. I knew it was going to be pretty much impossible to buy a nostepinne here, but I figured it should be easy to make. I gathered some designs, made a few scrawls on a bit of paper, and took it to the carpenter down the road who made our bed. The next day, he came back with this:

And here it is in action:

And to confirm it worked, I spent the weekend winding 25 balls of wool:

The variations in size are caused by two factors. One is that there is just variation in the amount of wool on the hanks we bought. And the other is that the first few balls I would were a little too tight and are smaller than they should be. I was also experimenting with the nostepinne and so some turned out shorter and fatter while others are taller and thinner depending on how big I made my base.

Soon I hope to post all the things I’ve made with all this colour-y goodness.