650 Pounds of Yarn

Over the past two weeks, I’ve been birthing a store... producing children in the form of yarn. Shipments have been arriving from JCA, Lorna’s Laces, Blue Sky Alpacas, and Muench. Next week I expect Bryson Distributing (needles & patterns) and Goddess Yarns.

Yarn doesn’t weigh that much so 650 pounds takes up quite a bit of space, as you can see from the photo above. Fortunately I have a sizeable unused area in my living room that has conveniently turned into my stockroom.

My first shipment came from Lorna’s Laces, makers of some of the best hand-dyed yarn available. This shipment was a little traumatic because 150 pounds of yarn came in only two boxes - one of which was 107 pounds! The box was so large that the UPS guy didn’t want to drag it up the outdoor concrete steps (I live in a second-floor condo) for fear of ruining the stairs (or perhaps his dolly). So we left the box at the foot of the stairs and I carried armloads of yarn (in plastic bags) up the stairs (under a hot 90 degree sun no less).

I worried that further shipments would come this way; fortunately, everyone else (so far) is packing the yarn much more sensibly - the average weight is 35 pounds.

After I get a shipment, I go through all the boxes and reconcile the packing slip - marking off everything I received. Above you see Adrienne Vittadini's Trina being unpacked and checked in. If there are discrepancies (and there have been a few), I call up the company to request the missing yarn. After checking everything in, I take the packing slip to the computer and enter all the yarn into my POS/Inventory system, which I have set up on my Mac. I’m using a commercially-produced POS package called Shopkeeper.