I’m acquainted with a fair number of people who are sweating the death of “new” knitting, but I personally (and selfishly) don’t give a crap whether and how yarncraft goes back out of style. Knitting is hundreds of years old. The ebb of its pop-culture value isn’t going to make yarn disappear. And knowing how to write patterns means that you don’t have to hope and pray that cool new books appear every season.

The knitting market is cooling down, though. Yarn is not flying off the shelves, and books are not selling phenomenally. I am convinced that there are a lot of reasons for this besides the death of the rebirth of knitting. The latest Knitty had this sensible article dissecting fears over the impending yarn bubble’s bust.

My favorite common-sense reasons not to panic over the very real plateaus in knitting item sales:
1. There are a million yarn books out there. How many can any one knitter be expected to buy?

2. The “first wave” of new knitters (a.k.a. the human novelty scarf factories) have not necessarily abandoned knitting– many of them graduated to projects that take time. Whole sweaters. Smaller needles. So even though they aren’t buying overpriced fun fur every other day, they will continue to require sweaters’ worths of good yarn over the years.

Also, I love the way that the Lorna’s Lace representative described the market as “correcting itself” away from novelty crap. Right on.

EDITED JANUARY 11 TO ADD a link to a great companion article I read through a link on Russel Yarn. The article is conveniently titled  The End Of Yarn . I have to start coming up with less obvious post titles, eh? Anyway, this one provides a bit more quantification of the yarn trend. I like that in an article.