Greetings from Yarn Crawl 2010

I’ve had to set aside the Watson socks while I work on some deadline knitting for a wedding at the end of this month, but I’ve taken the weekend off to go on a yarn crawl… eleven stores in four days and about 550 miles, whee!

So until I get time to post yarn crawl pics or finish the Watson sock pattern or do any other general updatey stuff, have a picture of the four sausage plate at The Dodging Duck in Boerne, TX.

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Field Trip

First, a bit of OMGWTFBBQ! I guess other Sherlock fans (possibly, ALL of them) found my Watson sweater post this week… 75 views on Friday alone. Wow, I feel popular. If any of y’all stuck around, I’m thinking of doing a “design a scarf for Holmes” series in a week or two… or possibly “design a shock blanket for myself” depending on how tonight’s episode goes.

So, on to what I meant to be writing about… two weeks ago my Friday morning knitting group decided that we’d make a field trip to a yarn store an hour outside of town, and scheduled it for this past Friday. Late on Thursday an email came from the store announcing a 15% off everything sale. Yay, timing! So we headed out to Yarnorama in Paige, TX.

Lots of pics and description of the day behind the cut, but I just had to put this guy out where everyone will see his ridiculously adorable face. This is Coco, one of the shop’s two angora rabbits:

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Days 3 & 4 and Yarn Crawl Haul

Two more stores and the new stash pics inside:

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Best Little Yarn Crawl in Texas, Picspam of Day 2

10 hours, 8 shops, *mumble*dollars spent

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Yarn Crawl, Day 2

Slept badly, woke too early, but I wasn’t the one driving and I wasn’t the one who flew in from Vancouver last night, so I really have no excuse to be as wiped out as I am.

We made it to 8 stores today though! I took pictures at some, forgot to at others. I petted a St. Bernard and a big black tomcat, and failed utterly to attract the interest of some alpacas who were six hours into being the featured attraction and were totally over the whole ‘being petted by people’ scene. We passed an exotic wildlife ranch with some sort of cervidae that had big racks but the spotted coat of fawns. We also passed a wake of turkey buzzards, and I was again glad to not be driving, because my car and I both have shaky nerves still, from the Great Turkey Buzzard Incident of ’08.

The only reason I dragged myself to the computer tonight instead of handwaving the whole thing until Monday is to enthuse about Cat Bordhi’s Personal Footprints book, which I picked up today. So far I’ve only looked at the pretty pictures, not read the guts of how to make them work, but I love this book already! I’m a big fan of the gusset technique from her New Pathways book, but with a few exceptions I wasn’t interested in making any of the socks in the book; I just adapted the technique to other sock patterns instead. This new book is full of awesome socks! I can’t wait to make the Chain Mail, and the Stained Glass, and the one with a symmetrical lace ‘seam’ down the front of the sock. There’s even an adorable ankle sock, and I never like those.

So yes. If you knit socks, go get this book. If you know how to knit, purl, increase, and decrease, go get this book and learn to knit socks. It’s the construction equivalent of skipping straight to Magic Loop instead of learning on fiddly DPNs. Heel flap? Pick up extra stitches at the corners to avoid making a hole? Wrap and turn? Ur doin it wrong.

One shorter road trip tomorrow to another store or possibly two. Bed now.

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Best Little Yarn Crawl In Texas, Day 1

This weekend is the Best Little Yarn Crawl in Texas, and I’d planned to hit up a few stores today, but it was raining and cold this morning. 57F is cold, y’all.

Tomorrow I’m road tripping to San Antonio, Boerne, Comfort, and Wimberley with Ravelry users eastskye, gayleb121, and kcshortes. I needed to go to the store for road trip essentials, so once the rain stopped I headed for my closest yarn shop, conveniently right next to a grocery store. BTW, I was more surprised than I probably should have been that you can now get organic, reduced sugar fruit juices in those handy Capri Sun-type packages.

Bluebonnet Yarn Shoppe, with my softtop and Ravelry decal in the foreground:

They’re my go-to shop when I need to make a head scarf to match a particular outfit, because they’ve got a huge assortment of colors and textures. The nice sedate yarns are there, but you have to hunt around the eyelash and other novelty yarns to find them. I don’t usually have a lot of luck there aside from headscarf yarn, but today I found the Spring 2005 pattern book from Adrienne Vittadini Yarns. The blue ruffles and lace cardigan on the cover first caught my eye, but I also really like the Twist Front Top, and the Textured Tank with Cables, though I’d mod the latter with a V-neck.

Wow. In looking up Ravelry links for those, it’s apparent that people haven’t had much luck substituting yarns in those patterns. Note to self – be even pickier than usual over getting the correct stitch and row gauge. Maybe I’m stupidly overconfident, but I still think I can make something that looks awesome.

Bluebonnet also had a nice sample of the Aeolian Shawl:

This is the shawl I want to knit out of Claudia’s Handpainted silk, once I have the time and patience to knit with such an unbendy yarn. I’ve never seen one made up that looked bad (except the people who picked a variegated yarn, bless their hearts).

In knitting news, I got three repeats in to Cookie A’s Clandestine Socks, then fell out of love with them. In order to show off the lace they need to be at a gauge smaller than comfortable, and mine fit perfectly and don’t look like lace at all. So I went back to working on the Icarus shawl blob, and that’s probably the project that will travel with me on the crawl.

Speaking of which, I should go see how small a parcel I can fit the essentials into for tomorrow – granola bars, apples, juice packs, asprin, Darvocet, Tums, and a hotdog-shaped styrofoam container to bring home leftovers from the sausage plate at The Dodging Duck. Four people and 6 yarn shops has the potential to be a LOT of extra bags by the end of the day!

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