A Harvard Haul
It’s been a big couple of weeks at The Stash House! We had two large estate cleanouts back-to-back that brought in a bounty of weaving cones, lux yarns, linen, muslin, and needlework grounds. I feel like I have hit the ground running as I’ve come out of my maternity leave, 5-month-old in tow, lifting large bins and boxes of fabric and yarn from here to there to here to there and back again. I sure am grateful for this enthusiastic and helpful community and for my strong employees who lift, shift, move, and organize this stuff with me every day.
Reba’s Collection
Reba owned The Fiber Loft in Harvard, MA, for forty years and, for some of that time, even had a mail-order weaving business run out of her house! She is an accomplished weaver and yarn-lover, and needless to say, her collection was considerable. Isabel and I had the honor of driving an hour to her house in beautiful Harvard, MA (not the Harvard you’re thinking of, that’s in Cambridge) to help Reba and her husband, Lenny, downsize into their retirement home.
When we got to Reba’s house, we discovered that she had a beautiful workshop that Lenny had built as an addition for her in the 1980s, with big windows, a big table, and lots of shelves for lots of cones of yarn. Reba had already held two tag sales and managed to sell a lot of her collection, but as you can imagine, there was still so much more. After touring us around the shop and telling us we could take anything we wanted, she walked us into the garage (full of cones) and the basement (yep - more shelves, more cones). Our eyes wide and eager to get to work Iz and I told her we would clean up what we could that day and definitely would need to come back next week to finish the job. Reba and Lenny went to the house for lunch, and Iz and I got to work.
Reba loved natural fibers and specialized in hand-painted chenille scarves that she and her friends would weave in white, and then turn beautiful colors with dye and paintbrushes. Her collection was full of wool, silk, angora, mohair, and lots of Rowan! We came home with Iz’s van filled to the brim and my car packed tight (minus the space for the baby in the back).
Back At The Stash House
Once we were back at the Stash House, we unloaded into the living room; this stash could’ve filled the entire donation room! I don’t often like to unload into the living room, but a special case is a special case!
The first load was mostly balls of yarn. As we organized the first round, we found a few categories for our initial sort:
Yarn balls with labels
Yarn balls without labels
Novelty yarns
Rowan Yarn
Weaving Cones
Weaving “Cakes”
And a mysterious group: balls of yarn that seemed to be many colors of the same yarn, all strung together and hand-wrapped in a ball.
Round Two
Round two was interesting. We brought trash bags because I figured we would have a lot of thinning out to do. Yarn in a studio space is one thing, but yarn in a garage or basement is almost guaranteed to have moth and mouse damage. 💡Plastic bins are the best help with this, but they aren’t a guarantee. Reba did not have her wool in bins, but luckily, most of it in the garage was wrapped individually in plastic. This seemed to keep out the bugs, but they definitely were just going for the easiest targets, which were the loose cones on the shelves. We ended up having to throw away a lot.
💡Here is my time to say that you should know we inspect our yarns to the best of our ability and throw away visible moth damage. You should always consider heat-treating your yarns before you bring them into your house, keep moth traps by your collection, and a vigilant eye. And yes, I mean this for yarn from the “new” store, too.
Still, we filled Iz’s car and mine again, and Reba gave us other helpful things, too, like tape for our shipping department and wire cube shelves that we assembled in our back stock room for more storage (which we desperately needed). I asked her about the strange balls of multi-strand yarn, and she told me that it was from back when she had to send out endless swatch packs to customers. She said she envied my website full of photographs. She offered us her mother’s table linen collection, which we accepted, and gave me an incredible Kaffee Fassett sweater that she had knit herself. I teared up. She even gave us her wedding dress, still heirloom packaged from 64 years ago.
Getting it to you
It was a lovely job and has been a labor of love since. I have been dragging these bins of yarn and cones out, day after day, to have sidewalk sales at the Stash House to try and thin out the herd a little bit before we start the work of listing them online. They are $2/lb in the shop and will be $4/lb online (it takes a lot more work than dragging a bin on the street to get them listed and photographed online for sale). Now, I’m having the fun of putting them together in family groups and collections. What blows me away is how NICE it all is. I’m overwhelmed by the volume and eager to get it through our hands, but it is not because I don’t love all of it. Reba curated a collection of incredible natural fibers from lovely companies all over the US. It is a relic of a time gone by, and all of what we took is usable and good.
The yarn has already been making its way onto the website (look at the “Runts” and “Oddballs,” that’s where they are mostly ending up), and the cones start to drop this week, first on the Member’s Drop on Wednesday at 8:00 PM Eastern and then to the public on Thursday at 8:00 PM. Have fun! We hope you enjoy hearing Reba’s story and that you take part in sharing her collection around - it is another triumph that we kept these ones out of the landfill and that they will live on to become beautiful works of art, useful lines in the garden, or just held onto in admiration for the next maker who comes along. We can’t wait to see what you do with them.
