Despite the questionable name, I’m quite excited about the opening of a new yarn store on SE Division (right by my house!!). At Yarnia you can design a custom blend of yarn—pick the fiber (mohair and wool), color (blue), thickness (two-ply), and amount (two pounds—yep, you pay by the mothereffin’ pound). Then proprietress Lindsey Ross busts out her steam-punk yarn machine, winds your fancy cone of yarn, and you walk out happier than stuffing your face with Turkish Delight.

Inspired by a DIY yarn shop in Montreal, Ross recounts the experience that was the inspiration for her store.

As you can probably guess, this place blew my mind. Cottons, acrylics, wools, boucle… even silk and mohair and metallics—boxes of these fibers lined the walls, filled with innumerable colors wound in uneven amounts on cones… These single filaments, I realized, piled nearly to the ceiling in boxes of like colors, were single-ply strands of yarn, waiting to be wound into what we everyday hand-knitters recognize as worsted weight commercial yarn.

Yarnia
4183 SE Division
488-0022
Grand opening on Saturday, Feb. 2

Yarnia’s Aslan. (Illustration by Brandon Reese)