Habu Textiles Mixed Silk Wool Stainless Steel Blend Lace Yarn, Discontinued

A bundle of seven Habu Textiles cones — most of them from yarn lines that Habu no longer spins or that have aged out of the current catalog. The famous A-148 1/17.6 wool & stainless steel is here in solid black; A-1 2/17 tsumugi silk in the tweedy jade-green Color 40; sage and olive tsumugi neighbors; a coppery single-ply wool; a shaggy tan boucle; and a deep almost-black wool with a faint metallic glint. Several still carry their original Habu kraft band; a couple were rebanded long ago at Knit 1 Bead 2, the Jerome, Arizona yarn shop, with its hand-priced $14 stickers still intact. This is what a yarn artist’s personal Habu shelf looks like after a decade of pulling threads.

This listing is for all seven cones pictured, sold together as a single Curator’s Cabinet bundle. Some cones are near-full; others are honest partials. The net yarn weight is recorded below the gross weight on the scale so you can see exactly what the cardboard cost.

About the yarns:

• Maker: Habu Textiles — 135 W. 29th Street, NYC (the original 1990s–2010s atelier address still printed on these bands)
• Cones in this lot: 7
• Identified lines (from labels and stickers):
  • A-1, 2/17 Tsumugi Silk, Color 40 — 100% silk, 450 yd / 1.7 oz per full cone, dry-clean / hand-wash
  • A-148, 1/17.6 Wool & Stainless Steel — 75% wool, 25% stainless steel; lace; discontinued at Habu
  • A-4-23 — Habu A-series silk-wool cone, ivory/cream
  • A-26-6 — Habu A-series cone, brown
  • Three additional Habu A-series cones (olive tsumugi, copper single-ply, tan boucle) — original bands no longer attached
• Weight classes (across the lot): mostly lace and fingering, plus one bulky boucle
• Fiber mix: silk, wool, wool/stainless steel, silk/wool blend
• Gross weight on the scale: 1 lb 1.5 oz (~496 g)
• Less ~28 g per empty Habu kraft cone × 7 cones: ~198 g of cardboard
• Net yarn: ~10.2 oz / ~300 g
• Care: follow each line’s native care — A-148 is hand-wash cool only (the steel core does not love hot water); A-1 tsumugi is dry-clean or careful hand-wash; the wool cones tolerate a gentle hand-wash
• Condition: destash from a working yarn artist’s studio — some cones near-full, some partials, photographed as shipped

About Habu Textiles. Habu was founded in Tokyo in 1976 and opened its New York studio in 1999; the cones in this bundle all carry the legacy 135 W. 29th Street, suite 804 address that Habu vacated in the late 2010s. Habu spins for hand-knitters and sculptural artists in equal measure — the A-series catalog runs from gossamer silk singles to wool-and-stainless-steel cones that hold the shape you bend them into. The A-148 1/17.6 wool stainless steel in this lot is the line that taught a generation of knitters that a yarn could remember a fold; Habu has not respun it. The A-1 2/17 tsumugi silk is the noil-fleck silk that Habu built its early reputation on — still listed in the catalog, but the matte tweed colorways like the Color 40 jade here turn over without notice. These are the cones that a working studio buys two of, opens one, and never sees on a shelf again.

From the Cabinet: a seven-cone Habu shelf, photographed as shipped. Held single for lace and gossamer scarves, doubled for fingering colorwork, and the steel-core black for any piece that needs to remember its own shape — there is no longer a place to reorder most of these.