I will start off with the punchline ... we just received shipment of the British yarns in question!
Last week I noticed we were running low on two BFL yarns, the Aran and Ultra!, both of which are consistently good sellers with my handdye artists. I looked at the inventory numbers of these two yarns showing on the website, and bumped up the numbers with confidence because we always receive our orders from England in three days, and sometimes in two days.
What I didn't know was that a record cold snap had just hit the United Kingdom and snow and ice had caused the major airports to close down. I was sitting in my pretty new studio working away at the computer, with National Public Radio playing in the background when one of the stories caught my attention. The report was about a record stretch of bad weather, the coldest it's been in 15 years in England, and that there was a shortage of road salt, so traffic all over the country had come to a crawl. Then they reeled off the list of airports which were closed due to icy runways, and it dawned on me that delivery of my little order might be affected by this!
I can 'chat' with my British Wool supplier on SKYPE (the greatest way to have a cyber conversation, if you ask me!), so I told him that I had just heard his weather forecast on my Virginia radio station! He confirmed everything I had heard, and added that they had spread grit on the roads, but it didn't make them much more passable. I'm not sure what 'grit' is, really, but think it might be gravel...
Freight travel must have improved though and the backed-up freight started moving again, yesterday, I think. We just received our FedEx shipment of the BFL Aran, BFL Ultra! and LUX Superchunky. Lovely stuff, this!
Makes you realize that your little corner of the world is in global communication, and that the connections between us are closely interwoven. I am off to post the actual numbers of these wonderful yarns.
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