Jimmy Beans Wool Beanie Bag Subscription Review – July 2016

Jimmy Beans Wool offers this delightful bag of fiber subscription goodness that they refer to as Beanie Bags.  They call them “A Taste of Fun”.  This is the Little Beanie Bag and in each month you get 4 to 6, 15-20 yard hand-wound balls of yarn, a sample size notion or accessory, a knit and a crochet pattern, and the beanie bag itself.

This card told us a little about this month’s Beanie Bag subscription.  The front of the card included some nice pictures of the projects completed.

Subscriptions are $10 a month including shipping (to the U.S.) and $15 to Canada.  You can choose monthly (auto renewing), or a 3, 6, or 12 month gift subscription (you can send these to yourself to if you don’t want auto-renewing).  FYI – If you need a little more yarn in your life they also offer a Big Beanie Bag for $25 a month.

The product description card is just for the fibers included.  This month is a 100% wool theme theme.  Each type of yarn is pictured and described, but note that you may not get the same color yarns as are in the pictures.  They also have a webpage devoted to the month’s Beanie Bag where you can find more product details, links to PDFs of the patterns (I like to download them to my phone so I don’t have to keep up with the paper pattern), helpful videos and links to other patterns to tempt you to creation.

The patterns are clearly written with a nice picture of the final product.  I appreciate that they have knit and crochet patterns.  There is enough yarn in the box to complete this pattern.

I have never tried felting.  I can’t wait!

This is the knit side of the pattern.  As knit takes less yarn than crochet, you can make two of the pattern if you choose to knit rather than crochet.

This packet of Soak for Jimmy Beans Wool in “lacey material girl” was also in the bag.  You can find a 3 oz bottle (good for 18+ washes) on their website for $10.00.  It’s a gentle no-rinse formulation for hand washing your fiber creations.

I don’t knit a lot (I usually crochet), but when I have knitted a project I have found it bothersome that the work can so easily slip off of the needles if you have to leave it for a while.  So, these are awesome.  I didn’t even know they existed.  (Seriously, I don’t knit much.)

There were six different colorways in this month’s subscription box.  Each hank of Blue Sky Fibers’ Woolstok is 5-grams of 100% fine premium Peruvian Highland wool.

This beautiful baby blue is called Thermal Spring.

This colorway is called Gravel Road.

This delicious bit of wool is called Dark chocolate.

This colorway they call Drift Wood.

This steely blue is called October Sky.

And lastly, this is the Spring Ice colorway.

And, lastly this is the Beanie Bag itself.  The bags are perfect for storing one of the dozens of  WIPs (works in progress) that I have going at the same time.  I am easily distracted by the next pretty pattern that comes along.

I still have to felt it and add a button, but isn’t it pretty?  I love the colors they chose.  And yes, it’s a little different than the pattern.  I tweaked it a little and made it into a phone purse instead of a soap saver.  It is still the same stitch though.

Here’s a close up of the stitch.  The stitch is called a Catherine Wheel and makes very pretty afghans. Once you learn the stitch in a pattern like this you can easily adapt it to other projects.

Jimmy Bean Wool’s Beanie Bag subscription is a great way to try out varieties of yarn that you have never tried before and to learn to new stitches.  I really enjoyed the texture (softer than most wool I have tried) of this yarn and the colors that were included were beautiful together.  I am looking forward to the next Beanie Bag.

What do you think of the Beanie Bag?

Visit Jimmy Beans Wool Beanie Bags to subscribe or find out more!