How a knitted protest hat sparked a nationwide shortage of red yarn

Tiffany Perry is helping one of her customers knit a red hat. She’s the owner of The Artful Yarn outside of Cleveland.

“It's got a triangle top, and then at the top, there is like two inches worth of a braid and a tassel at the end,” she said.

We are now two months into a major supply chain disruption — one that is sweeping across the nation’s yarn stores. There has been a major run on red yarn. The shortage is down to a knitting pattern from 1940s Norway that’s been repurposed as a protest against immigration enforcement here in the U.S.

It started out as a pattern signaling resistance to the Nazis. In January, in Minnesota, it was adapted as a symbol of resistance against immigration raids.

“We definitely had a couple three weeks where somebody was coming in every day to buy red yarn,” Perry said.

Months later, this shop hundreds of miles away is still selling out. One supplier said the demand for red yarn is five or 10 times higher than normal.

“We keep always a few months’ supply for each color, and in one week, we were out of red,” said Tobias Feder, who co-owns a supplier called Malabrigo Yarn. “We really started dying as fast as we could, and it's still out of supply.”

Feder’s hand-dying company takes roughly six weeks to respond to a demand surge this big. Companies that dye yarn industrially can take up to three months.