I ordered some yarn online over the last month or two. First, I ordered Senke from MacKintosh yarn. Then I ordered Milkweed from Handwerks Textiles and finally Teal Mist and Robin Hood from Barking Dog yarn.
I had different experiences with each of these shops. Two great and one not so good. Here are the stories.
Senke was ordered on 6/18. Everyone on Ravelry seems to really like Liz’s yarn and she had the best colorway selections of her yarn on her site, so I decided to get it straight from her. It finally arrived on 7/13. Now, I don’t mind waiting a few weeks for yarn to ship provided I’ve been informed of this. I emailed Liz three different times asking for a status on my yarn and never received a reply. She got a tracking number on 6/29, but the yarn was not actually mailed until 7/11. So, no matter what it looked like when it got here, I was going to be irritated with the yarn. It couldn’t possibly look good enough for me to be happy to wait in silence for almost a month. If you really want MacKintosh yarn, my advice is to buy from a reseller.

I ordered the yarn from Suzan of Barking Dog Yarns on a Sat. and it was here within a week. The Teal Mist (Achilles) is amazing. I wasn’t as crazy about the Robin Hood (Achilles), so I emailed her nicely about being interested in something more forest green and she had me mail it back and she’s shipped me something darker. Totally nice and GREAT customer service!! I will definitely buy from her again mostly because her use of color is genius, but also because she is crazy nice and gives wonderful customer service.

Laura at Handwerks and I emailed about her different yarns on a Saturday because I was unsure which one might be coolest (temperature-wise). It is a tad warm here in Texas right now…a tad warm in the way that the Pope is a tad Catholic. She emailed me back right away and was able to give me advice. I selected the Milkweed colorway of So-Soft-Sock. It is lovely and I cannot wait to see it knitted up. She even sent me a little sample of her Super 8 DK sock yarn for me to try and a card with a tiny sample of each of her yarns on it. Fabulous customer service and her yarns are beautiful!