Two more stores and the new stash pics inside:
In the end I made it to all but one store on the yarn crawl. Fredericksburg isn’t really near anything else, and we had limited patience for sitting in the car after the driving marathon on Saturday.
Yarnorama isn’t near anything either, but it’s one of my favorite shops so we made the drive out there on Sunday. We didn’t even stop in Elgin for barbecue, which is the other consolation for driving an hour east of town.
Yarnorama hosts first Saturday spin-ins, and Robin of Robincat Yarns was there with her spinning wheel and handspun yarns for sale.
As somebody who’s only ever used a drop spindle (and isn’t very good at it), I think it’s fascinating to watch someone who can spin and hold a conversation at the same time. Spinning intimidates me because it’s like stained glass in that a mistake ruins your raw materials. And the yarn I like the looks of the best, the stuff with plies in different colors, looks so pretty in the skein that I have a hard time thinking of projects that would live up to it.
The peachy skein up front found a new owner while I was there. I hope it goes into something gorgeous!
The shop’s angora bunnies, Coco and Chanel, have gotten much bigger since the first time I saw them. Coco:
And Chanel, who I think has bunny ADHD because I’ve never gotten her to hold still for a decent picture where you can actually see her face:
I ended up getting two skeins of Ella Rae Lace Merino (more of a fingering weight, really) in one of their new colorways. It reminded me of the colors of the dragon wings from my stained glass front door, so I decided to make a shawl, possibly one of those with Faroese shaping, in a dragonscale pattern. I didn’t think to take a picture of the nifty scarf the company had sent, made from blocks of each of their new colorways, but here’s an Exonumist’s Circular Shawl that Yarnorama’s owner knit in a different colorway of the Ella Rae:
Sorry about the flash picture – it was raining off and on that day, so not much natural lighting.
On Monday I headed to Gauge as my final stop. When Gauge first opened there was an apothecary jar that they’d put all the bits of ties in, from hanks that got opened up and caked in the shop:
They must be doing well, because now there are full jars all over the shop:
As you can see, Gauge arranges yarn by size, which is handy for bee-lining straight to the sock yarn, and also handy for locating substitute yarns for specific patterns. I had saved this store for last partly because they’re local, and also because I was hoping they’d sell out of the Colinette Jitterbug that I had my eye on. Because seriously, this weekend’s buying habits to the contrary, I do not need more sock yarn.
So naturally, I bought more sock yarn. *facepalm* Not the Jitterbug, though, because I noticed they’d gotten in a ton of colorways of Mini Mochi, which is one of the yarns Cat Bordhi used in Personal Footprints. I’m really looking forward to going back to Gauge next month for Cat’s class in designing your own stitch patterns and families of stitch patterns (and I’ve already bought yarn in the expectation that I’ll be able to design what I have in mind for it).
So, the yarn crawl haul, in total:
Aside from the books and the niddy noddy, my purchases looked like this:
From front left, that’s the clown barf Prism, Ella Rae, String Theory, Hacho for the super sekrit project, Wildfoote, Hacho for gloves for me, Sugar Rush for the lace fingerless gloves from the Vogue Holiday 09, and in back the silk merino roving and Mini Mochi. I have not yet added up my receipts, but it’s all coming out of last year’s leftover Christmas budget, else I would have been much more restrained in buying.
The giveaways from each store, which was covered in the $15 passport fee:
Four stores gave away full skeins of yarn along with a pattern or patterns for using them (five if you count the store that gave away acrylic, which I really kind of don’t). And let’s be honest, those are the coolest giveaways, because there’s enough yarn to go do what you want with it instead, so Yarnorama, Hill Country Weavers, Old Oaks Ranch, and The Tinsmith’s Wife get props for that. Three other stores had patterns with mini-skeins of unnamed yarn in enough yardage to make their pattern. Yarnivore had the coolest non-yarn item, a guide to yardage requirements and one of those cool thingies for picking up stitches that has a crochet hook on one end and a pointed other end to knit off of. The consensus of the group I traveled with was that we’d all heard of this tool but nobody owned one, and we were all happy to get it. It was also nice to have something nominally useful to crocheters, too… I noticed a lot of the places that gave out free patterns weren’t accounting for the crochets-but-doesn’t-knit contingent.
Yarn crawl is always a fun weekend, and now I have lots of new stuff to play with. I’ve already started my first personal footprint sock with the Mini Mochi!
That looks like so much fun! I loved the photos.