surreality surreality
Jan 24, 2020, 7:18 PM

Crafter woe: I have no choice but to finish sorting floss today, along with the housecleaning. I have too much weird random stuff to not bite the bullet and just do it.

The vast, vast majority of what I have is some weird brands I bought from amazon or have picked up over the years. Since I'm working from my own charts or concepts usually, that they're mystery colors or not going to mix in with each other tends to not be a big deal, but it does mean I need to sort out each brand into its own space as they don't mix well texture-wise.(1) For instance, the tie-dye fabric piece a few posts up, I'm just using a cheap rainbow color pack from Michaels' home brand. 40% off $18? Pfft, worth a shot for 100+ skeins in a simple rainbow with enough duplicates of each to get pretty far on stuff where I'm just fucking around.

Worse - awesome, but worse for this sorting fiasco - my mother saw I needed a ton of floss for a crochet thing(2), bitched at me that I was getting the more expensive DMC, and did a 'THIS IS ALL THE FLOSS YOU WILL EVER NEED IN YOUR LIFE' and ordered a shit-ton from amazon for me, which was SUPER SWEET OF HER AND I LOVE HER FOR IT, but she, uhm, got 12 packs of 300 totally random skeins each (they were incredibly cheap). It took two days to sort it all into baggies(3) and it fills like... 6 shoeboxes? They also can't be sorted just by number, because the dye lots vary wildly, so I had to go by number and then by dye lot and... yeesh. Sad fact is, I actually really like the quality of them, so while they'd only work for my weird stuff, I do like using them! Some stuff we've gotten over the years has been much worse quality and cost a lot more, they'd just be awful for dye lot consistency or knowing you can get more of a specific color period.

Pulling one skein from each sorted baggie to card and box is something of a challenge, though, no lie. The one box of 'red-purple-pink-peach' took a day. 😐

I may just chicken out and do the 'ooh so fancy!' box of weird DMC stuff today. I can never resist their fancies ever. 😕

  1. ...and one of them has a zillion textures and finishes from just the one brand. Supposedly the 'nicest' amazon brand, no less. Definitely one of the pricier ones among the cheapies. This is great if I feel like varying textures, but if I wanted uniformity, dye lot consistency, or even labeled colors? I WOULD BE SO PISSED.

  2. I love the yarn that's made from multiple threads connected at different points to build gradients. She bought me a bunch of thread for this, but it is HARD to work with and super fine, embroidery floss works better for smaller items.

  3. Tooooooootally not kidding about that sorting thing! That was weirdly soothing.