Pussyhat Project for Women’s March causes run on pink yarn

Beverly Edmonds desperately needed pink yarn. Not for Valentine’s Day, nor for Breast Cancer Awareness month. She needed the suddenly hard-to-find hue for a certain special hat.

Edmonds joined hundreds of other knitters in the Bay Area chasing down spools of pink yarn, which flew off shelves at an unprecedented rate, as knitters across the nation made pink hats with cat ears for participants of the global Women’s March in Washington, D.C., on Saturday and simultaneous protests locally.

“My hats are going all over the place,” the 68-year-old Benicia resident said. “Some are going to D.C., some are going to Sacramento, some are in Walnut Creek. One lady said she’s going to look for a little sticker that says Benicia and put it on her hat.”

Launched Thanksgiving weekend, the Pussyhat Project issued a call to arms for knitters to create a symbolic statement to counter a crude reference President-elect Donald Trump was caught making on a hot mike about grabbing the genitals of women. The project also sought to embolden people unable to attend the march, like Edmonds, by making hats to be sent to the nation’s capital.

“I just hope that this really has an effect,” said Edmonds. “I don’t really think it’s going to have any effect on Donald Trump rather than make him angry. It may change some of the people in Congress if they believe that their constituents are really serious.”

With the clock ticking down toward the march, expected to draw more than 200,000 participants in Washington and millions more at sister marches organized globally, Edmonds hit an unexpected knot in her rush to complete the remaining hats she’s promised to marchers.

Her one problem? No more pink yarn.

Edmonds rushed to a nearby Michaels, the arts and crafts retail chain, hunting for the coveted yarn. No luck.

In sheer frustration, she took to Amazon. The soonest the e-commerce giant could deliver was in four to six weeks, she said, and that was too late.

So, she posted a call out on Facebook to recruit help. Her friend Adrean Hayashi saw the post and offered to help.

Hayashi drove out to the Michaels in Vallejo from her home in Benicia and after searching the store for 30 minutes with Edmonds on FaceTime, she was able to snag close to 10 skeins of pink yarn.

“I took everything there was,” Hayashi said. “There wasn’t a whole lot. There are bins under the actual racks so I pulled out every single black bin to see if there were any (pink yarn spools) in there, and there were none.”

The dwindling stock of salmon-colored yarn wasn’t exclusive to Michaels. Owners of yarn stores across the Bay Area said they’ve never sold so much pink yarn.

Celia McCarthy, a co-owner of Piedmont Yarn and Apparel in Oakland, is one of many yarn stores participating in the Pussyhat Project by holding workshops for knitters to make the iconic beanies together and is also a drop-off zone for completed hats.

“Pink is not an easy color to sell,” McCarthy said. “We’ve sold more pink yarn in the last six weeks than any time I’ve ever seen pink yarn being sold.”

McCarthy has reordered a supply several times since the project started. She had 20 skeins delivered to her shop Monday and within hours, she had sold 13 of them, she said.

“Everybody’s upset about the way things have gone politically, and everybody’s anxious to have a symbol of their angst,” McCarthy said.

So far, hat makers have donated more than 350 hats at her shop, McCarthy said, and she’s planning to ship them all to Washington. Any remaining hats that are donated will be handed out to marchers in Oakland, she said.

Justine Malone, the owner of the yarn department at Cast Away and Folk, a yarn store in Santa Rosa, was expecting 30 more skeins of pink yarn to be delivered to her shop Wednesday.

The Pussyhat Project posted instructions on its website of a pattern to guide those making the hats. The pattern calls for a medium weight pink yarn, which Malone said her shop sold out of nearly a week ago.

“We are having to convince people to alter the pattern a little bit so they can use a thinner or thicker yarn rather than what’s called for,” Malone said.

When Malone set out to reorder more pink yarn, she said her closest distributor on the West Coast had run out, and she was forced to order from a distributor in New York.

“Some people are just going for purple,” Malone said, adding that people are improvising and branching out to colors as close to pink as possible to ensure they get their hats in time.

And using different shades of pink is perfectly OK, reasoned Jeanine Bould, the owner of FashionKnit in Walnut Creek.

“There are many different shades of us,” said Bould, adding that she hasn’t run into a shortage of pink yarn at her store because she dyes her own. “It’s really neat to see that women are purchasing all different shades of pink — it’s really beautiful.”

Edmonds is frantically knitting up to two hats a day to complete her list of eight remaining orders.

“Oh boy, am I knitting hats,” Edmonds said. “I just want to do my part to be a part of the movement.”