My little Yarn Adventure with a clueless old man!

This an interesting little tale I had that happened to me sometime in July. From a simple question I posted on a Facebook Group, it grew into a little movement to help out an old man.!

How it all started

It all started when I posted something up on a local crochet facebook group on how I was looking to find new accessible brands in Singapore. I used to use Orion Deluxe Top Yarn from Japan because I felt it was good quality yarn for a decent price. This is what I posted:

This was one of the replies I got and I was most intrigued:

The conversation

So I spoke to this gentleman called David, tried to get a sense of what he had available and he subsequently sent me a whole barrage of images. They were not categorized and he just really took shots of whatever he saw.

I tried asking him the usual things that crocheters would be interested in - the material, the ply, the weight, the colours, the brand. His reply was hilarious, he said ‘it is like tiny ropes, will have to find out more’ because he was not familiar with the products. Naturally from the photos, I was even more intrigued, it also seemed like he did not exactly understand the value of the products he was holding.

The meet-up

So, during the Hari Raya holiday, my wonderful husband told me to go check it out, while he spent some time with our little one. Mind you, this is not something I would usually do. I was a very adventurous person in the past, but having a kid sometimes anchors you back down to reality and under normal circumstances, I did not have time for such ‘frivolous escapades’.

I made my way down to an area I was not familiar with and he came down to find me there. He was a mild-mannered elderly man, likely in his 70s and preferred conversing in Mandarin. He brought me up to a pretty dingy and dilapidated small apartment unit (now retrospectively realise how dangerous this could sound haha!), where all the yarn was being housed.

His story goes that his elder sister recently suffered a severe stroke which landed her in a nursing home. She used to own an yarn shop but when times were bad, she could not afford the rental and the physical location was taken back. She then tried to sell them in night-markets (what we Singaporeans like to call Pasa-malam) but those were similarly shut down due to the Covid situation.

Now she was uncommunicative in the nursing home and it was left to him to manage all these remaining stock that she has, the storage location was also going to be reclaimed back by the government so he had to find a way to clear them all.

He told me he tried counting the number of balls he had - there were different brands, different colours and different weights. As someone who did not enjoy fibre art crafting, I can see how all the different categorizations could be overwhelming for him. When I told him the number of grams was important but crocheters really want to have details on colours, ply, material and brand, I guess he kind of raised up his arms in defeat because it was too much to sort for someone who did not know what he was sorting.

My loot

I looked through the yarn, he had 1200 pieces or more in total, he did not even know the value except for some numbers scribbled on the plastic. He told me initially he was willing to let go of it at $1 per ball but he was actually not too sure if it was appropriate. He then went on to say he was willing to let them go at any price. I told him each ball was likely worth $2-3 for the brands that I knew. So I decided to just grab a whole bunch of colours from Orion Top, some that I didn’t even really need and this is how it turned out:

I paid him $110 in total for all these which was the initial agreed arrangement and I did not want to bargain with him further. To be honest, I was saving that money to get a Scheepjes Catona starter pack but spending this money with David was so much more meaningful!

After-math

Either way, he was grateful for whatever I could offload from him. I did discuss with my husband on taking everything off from him but I just did not have space to house them all. So I did the next best thing, I told him have you considered selling them online? He said it was too much of a hassle and he did not know how to do it. Besides, that would require categorization of all the yarn for which he did not have time and energy to do. He had reached out to a couple of Craft Studios which was where I first got the contact initially but there wasn’t much follow-up. So, I told him I will do my best to let whoever I could reach out to online, find out more about his yarn supplies and that he was a decent person to deal with.

He even mentioned if he could not clear it, he would likely donate the remainder to a charitable cause.

I went back to my initial contact and told her of my experience and we jointly decided to blast it out on our local crochet group in the hopes that more women might go down and find him. There were 34 women who replied back!

I also reached out to this small group for whom I was involved in some charitable crochet cause, to get their yarn from him and posted on my Ig. Had an old friend reach out to me to find out more for her mother who crochets!

The ‘Uncle David’ Movement

In the following few days, I saw a flurry of messages in the same Facebook group and it was positively heartwarming! More and more women were heading down to his little make-shift ‘warehouse’ to pick up his yarn!

As of the writing of this blog post, he is still getting inundated with requests to go down and check out his yarn and I did check back with him and he was most grateful! That has got to be one of my most random and interesting yarn sourcing experiences ever!