Lynne Kiesling
There’s this really great outfit called Blue Moon Fiber Arts that makes some of the most gorgeous hand-dyed yarn for knitting that you can imagine; gorgeous yarn born out of the vision of one woman. I bought my first Blue Moon yarn, a variegated rayon in amazing shades of olive, a year and a half ago at Knit Purl in Portland, Oregon (a very nice and friendly store). Over the past year, lots of knitters around the world have fallen under the power of Socks that Rock, variegated sock yarn from Blue Moon. Indeed, I myself have a large skein of Socks that Rock, in the Cobblestone Country colorway. As soon as I’m done with the bamboo socks I’m making for the KP Spouse, I’ll be making these for myself.
Blue Moon runs a Rockin’ Sock Club in which you can sign up to receive a bi-monthly fix of Socks that Rock yarn for a year, among other goodies. Like so many other hobbies that appeal to fetishists, things like this sock club for this coveted yarn produced a frenzy, so much so that … Blue Moon’s bank closed its accounts and refunded all of the money to sock club members because they were convinced that Blue Moon was running a scam!
Is this the Patriot Act and the Bank Secrecy Act run amok, or just incompetent bank implementation of said regulation? It is certainly poor customer service!
For the Reader’s Digest condensed version check out this Yarn Harlot post and this post at January One. Just to give you a sense of how big a frenzy this yarn/club have produced, note the almost 200 comments on the Yarn Harlot post about the “scam”.
Note also Mr. Dubner’s notes on this event at Freakonomics. His wife’s been bitten by the bug too; will we soon be reading Freakonomics posts about how comfortable his homemade socks are? And he does comment that
Levitt’s sister runs Yarnzilla, an online and brick-and-mortar knitting emporium; and my wife has recently become a knitting
zealotenthusiast. (I am always intrigued that so many people have embraced menial tasks — knitting, cooking, gardening, e.g. — as high-end hobbies, but that is a whole ‘nother story.)
I’d like to read that post, please, because it intrigues me too.