Y’all this is a full-on rant.

So I’m knitting this sweater, and for me it’s a big deal because I’m using somewhat pricey yarn, a good cotton/wool blend that is absolutely heavenly to handle, and it’s not even for me. So I start this pattern and I have all of the main color that I need but I still need to two contrasting colors for the stripe section.

Now, we now have three local yarn shops, and since I do not have a whole lot to spend on fibers I decided to go to the newest one which had just opened the week before which carried this brand of yarn and see if she had the colors I needed. She did not, but offerred to order them for me as she had other items to order from that company.

This was a couple of weeks ago. It did occur to me that it had been a little while, but since I wasn’t to the color change in the pattern yet, I didn’t worry. But today I get a call. It goes something like this:

Erica: May I speak to *scraps*?

Me: Speaking.

Erica: Hi, this is Erica from Wooly Bully and I have a note here to call you when the Cotton Fleece you wanted came in. Well, I placed the order and part of it was backordered, so then all the rest came in except for the colors you wanted. So I called them and asked about it and apparently those colors are being discontinued and I told them to hold off because I wasn’t sure what you were trying to match.

Y’all, I’m not kidding with this next part: The colors I wanted?

Black and White.

Really.

BLACK and WHITE

HOW can a yarn company discontinue black and white??? What the hell?

I mean, I understand about limited edition colorways. By their innate scarcity they bring a higher price and an increase of perceived value. I get that. But Black? and White?

The Hell?

So this is the email I just sent the company from their comment form:

Hello there!

I got a very strange call from my local yarn shop (Wooly Bully in Tallahassee, FL) telling me that the two colors of Cotton Fleece I had asked her to order for me (for a sweater that is already in progress for which I have all of the main color I will need) were discontinued and therefore unavailable. Now, my consternation comes when you consider the two colors I requested:
White and Black

Are you really discontinuing the two most ubiquitous colors ever? Why would you do that?

Or is it that we’re just using the wrong names? I look on the Cotton Fleece page and I see Cavern (which looks pretty black to me) and Cotton Ball (which looks pretty white to me). If I call my yarn store owner and tell her to ask for those colors will it do me any good or am I going to be forced to start over on this sweater with a new yarn brand to get the colors that I need? (Because, let me assure you, if I cannot get a white yarn and a black yarn from you I will not be purchasing your yarns in the future for *ANY* project.)

Absolutely confused…

But really, if a retailer called up and asked you for black and white yarns in a certain product line, and you knew that you called them different things, wouldn’t you do the responsible thing and say we have Cavern which is our black and Cotton Ball which is our white? You wouldn’t say they were discontinued just because she had the wrong color name and risk missing a sale, would you?

I just don’t get it…