A friend told me about the tent sale at the Spinrite factory in Washington, North Carolina. I’ve lived here for more than 20 years, and I can’t recall ever hearing about it before. I put the dates on the calendar and cleared a day. I followed their Facebook event and noted the pricing and the sales offers.
(Follow Spinrite Yarn Outlet on Facebook to get the dates of the next event. There is no website for the factory in Washington, NC.)
Today was the day. My husband was afraid I was going to get up at the crack of dawn and go, but the sale didn’t start till 10. I didn’t leave the house till 10:30. I believe that anything I need to own will be there, and there’s no need to stress myself about getting there first.
The drive is easy enough; it’s 53 miles from my husband’s house in Goldsboro, all on good roads. The weather was nice. It was warm but not too hot and clear and dry. It would be harder to load the car in the rain.
When I arrived, I simply walked around the tent a couple of times to figure out where things were and to get my brain loaded. Everything is listed at a very very good price, and at “buy 3, get 1.” Real wool, particularly the bulky, is still expensive for my current pocketbook. Bags of 10 skeins of bulky weight soft wool were $52, buy 3 get 1.
I haven’t used much of the bulky, “knit a blanket” yarns. Apparently, knitting blankets is a hugely popular thing now, because many of the yarns were packaged and branded as, “one skein it’s a blanket.” They had several bins of 1 lb skeins in colors I didn’t want.
After the first lap, I started picking out yarns, collecting four bags of any variety to get the B3G1 offer.
In addition to the bagged yarns, which were packaged the way they would be shipped to the retail store, the sale offered three bins of three huge bins of unlabeled yarns, neatly skeined. These yarns were available for $20 for all you could fit in a plastic bag they gave you, with the caveat that you had to be able to tie the bag at the top. I took two bags of unlabeled yarns, some of which were identical to yarns available in bags. The workers explained that there was some label testing that went on with these yarns; perhaps the label maker failed. There were no guarantees of being able to find more than one skein of a color, but lots of the colors were represented with 5-20 skeins.
A special in 2019 was a huge run of grey “seconds” yarn, worsted weight, 1 pound skeins. It had been processed at the same time as a run of black on a neighboring production line. The grey had picked up tiny tufts of black. It was a cut-rate price.
In addition there were two big bins, 4’ on a side (64 cubic feet, roughly), of yarns that had been unwound from the skein for measuring (to make sure the skeins were as long as the label said they were), and then dropped in a plastic bag still unwound. Each of these bags had at least two and sometimes 3 or 4 skeins-worth of unwound yarn, in random colors. It was $2 for the bag, buy 3 get one. I took 8 bags for $12. There are at least 30 skeins of yarn in those 8 bags. These bins were replenished several times during my shopping activity, and different yarns came out in each replenishing.
Spinrite provides port-a-johns for shoppers. Chairs were made available for shoppers who needed to take a break for a couple of minutes.
I shopped on a Thursday and there was no wait to check out, plenty of room to select yarns, and no crowd. Lines had been marked at the checkout station, so it was clear that the crowds are bigger at other times of the sales week.
Based on pictures of the kickoff of the 2016 sale, there must have been a lot of product gone by the time I arrived on Thursday in 2019. I did not notice a lack of anything, although I might have been more tempted if more bags of one colorway of the bulky wool had been on the table. (It might have been in the boxes and I carefully did not ask.)
One of the women tidying up the unlabeled yarns had a distinctly Wisconsin / Canadian accent, and I almost asked her how she found her way to Washington, NC. When I looked up the website to check how to spell the company name, I realized the answer. Spinrite is a Canadian company, with one US factory in Washington. If you get a chance to go to the outlet store in Listowel, ON, go. I’ll be going back to the tent sale next year. Some posts on Google suggest there might be another tent sale in NC in October. Stay tuned!
