Welcome to the final installment of my YarnBox Journey series! If you haven’t already, go back and read the previous posts! :)

As I mentioned in Part 3, when Jenn was finished with each skein, she set it aside and moved on. I would then swoop in and braid the skeins, careful to keep each dye lot of three skeins together. The braiding is a trade secret, so I won’t share a photo of that step. But the step after is something I can show: labeling!

The labels are made in-house, and as much care went into each label as the yarn itself. I printed them out on our color laser-jet so they won’t bleed if they get wet. Then Dad used our big paper cutter to cut hundreds in a matter of minutes. And those corners didn’t round themselves! Me, both my sisters, Mom, and Dad each took a turn at corner-punching! It was a little detail that I feel adds a lot to the look of the labels. Even despite the huge quantity of yarn we were working with for YarnBox, we didn’t leave that detail out!

Here are the labels for the other colorway. Did you notice that the ball of yarn the chickadee is carrying is darker than the yarn on the labels for the lighter colorway? Another little thing I did just because. Oh, and by the way, that dye lot is my personal dye lot and is quite a bit darker than the ones we sent out. It just came out of the dye pot that way, and I decided to keep it. Don’t worry, I replaced those skeins with ones from my shop inventory so a YarnBox member wouldn’t miss out on Annie Yarn! ;)

Back to packaging… After each dye lot was braided and labeled, I put it in a bag. It was fun to watch the stack of bagged dye lots grow! To me, each bag represented a knitter who is getting my yarn. It’s a humbling and inspiring thought, and it’s one that I carried through this whole process. Sometimes while braiding skeins, I found myself wondering who will get the skein in my hands just then, where it would travel, and what it would become. To see them in their little bags, almost ready to go out into the knitterly world, gave me such a feeling of excitement!

I forgot to get a photo of the bags with their adorable little chickadee stickers on them. Rats! Ah well, if you got a bag then you’ve seen the sticker, so it doesn’t matter.

Now for the final part. We tucked the bags into their boxes, counted the dye lots a zillion times to make sure everything was in order, and then got the boxes ready to go to FedEx. We had a tower of boxes in our entryway the entire time this whole thing was going on, and it was very rewarding to look at those boxes and know that each one was full of finished yarn. Not bags of yarn waiting to be dyed. Not dyed skeins waiting to be re-skeined. No. Finished yarn in bags!