Meisenwahn

There are few yarns in the knitting world that cause a hype such as those sold by the Wollmeise. A couple of years ago it was still possible to simply go online and order the yarns in the colors you wanted – you could even ask for different shades (light/medium/dark).

Nowadays, you have to be there (online) right on time when the weekly job update happens on Friday mornings. Still, there’s a good change that between the time you manage to put a skein in the color you want into your shopping basket and the time after you dug your credit card out of your purse in the living room, the skein will not be available anymore. This has let to skeins being sold on ebay for ridicules amounts of money. On Ravelry, skeins of Wollmeise being offered in trade are gone within seconds. People downright horde skeins. “My precious” is heard more than once as proud owners cradle their skeins. One might get the impression they are made of gold.

Other than buying online, there are very few places you actually can go and buy this yarn. Here in Germany there is a brick and mortar store in Pfaffenhofen (close to Munich), but this is only open every other weekend or so, which makes going there a little bit difficult for the average working stiff. Except, once per year (I think), the shop is open for a whole week. However, you can’t buy the regular yarn during that week, but only second choice, the ‘unlucky fellows’ (aka ‘Unglücksraben’) that didn’t quite made the cut, may it because the color didn’t quite come out the way they should have, or because there are knots in the skeins, or because the skeins are under weight.

Still, even with those little flaws, the yarn is still very, very pretty.

So, on Thursday, on my way from Frankfurt to Dresden, I took a little detour. What is 300km for some Wollmeise yarn, really? I know of people who fly from the US just to shop there (though, I guess, usually they try to sell it to their family as a jolly good vacation in the lovely country of Germany).

I arrived around 2pm in Pfaffenhofen and quickly found my way to the store. Overwhelmed by wool fumes and assaulted by pretty colors I stumbled back out 45 min later, a good part of my money gone, but with 10 skeins of sock yarn in blues, green, red, honey and white and 2 skeins of lace yarn in blue.

For the lace yarn I plan on making another Featherweight cardigan and the sock yarn calls to being knit into a nice colorful blanket and/or maybe even into socks.

But for now, I’m going to sit next to my pretty new yarn any time I can and pet it a little bit now and then.