NYC Yarn Crawl Report

Bet you're all dying to hear about the yarn crawl. It was fun, but, embarassingly, I got yarned out on Saturday. How is that even possible?!? I guess part of it is that I have quite a few yarns already that I'm really excited to work with, and my brain isn't really up for adding many new ones right now. Anyway, on to the crawl...

Isobel and I started at Downtown Yarns (she's got our city map just in case); we arrived a few minutes before they opened, so we were among the first to enter the raffle. I'm still holding out hope that we won a basket, but that's dwindling as Wednesday draws to a close.

Here's what the inside looks like. There are a few additional pictures of my crawl on my Flickr - I didn't want to bog down the blog with all of them.

Two skeins of madeline tosh Worsted in Ink made it's way into my bag; I'm thinking a little vest for winter with it. As you may know I lurve the tosh sock yarn and am sure I will be just as pleased with the worsted. Watch here for further details.

Then we walked along Houston to First and stopped for lunch at Little Veselka, an unknown-to-me branch of the super-yummy Veselka diner in the Village, where we always try to go with Nick's mom, since she's Ukrainian and Veselka is in the Ukrainian section of New York. Delicious food! I recommend the Meat Stuffed Cabbage with Beets and Horseradish and Egg Noodles. Anyway, I had a beautiful beet, goat cheese, candied walnut, and mandarin orange section salad, while Isobel turned her nose up at a grilled Vermont cheddar on challah bread in favor of the bag of chips. Oh, well.

After a little playground time for the young lady, we walked across Houston to Sullivan. I worried at times that it might be a fool's errand, but we did stop in to Crate and Barrel at Lafayette to use the loo (C&B always has nice facilities, though they do their best to hide them away), which is a good thing, since bathrooms can be hard to find unless you're George Costanza.

As you can see, by the time we got to Purl Soho, Isobel was somewhat disenchanted with the yarn crawl:

Oh, well. She did pretty well for the most part with the Purl Soho staff and decided she needed a skein of Manos Silk Blend (denied until we have a few more knitting sessions with a sturdier yarn). I did pick up a skein each of navy and cream fingering weight yarn from Nature's Palette to create some Selbuvotter. Now I just have to decide which ones.

There were vague thoughts of trying to squeeze in one more LYS, but clearly Isobel needed to come home, so we ended up on the 1 train with a couple from Wisconsin to whom I'd given Downtown Yarns directions. They'd decided to bag that for the day and head to the Upper West Side. I sent them to Knitty City and hope they had fun.

I did go to Knitty City (on my own) on Sunday, ran into Susie from the Yarntopia (and how lame am I that I didn't even make it to my real LYS? I must be coming down with something) knitting group, and picked up a skein of beautiful Jojoland Harmony, which is a merino cobweb yarn that I was unfamiliar with (I've checked out Jojoland yarns but never Harmony). There are 880 yards in that little bun, and the colors vary a little in a sort of moire way from lilac to lavender - something seriously lacy is in the offing at some point soon. I also added Mary Thomas's Knitting Book to my collection (I have the Book of Knitting Patterns), since Knitty City was having a sale on books.

After that I headed up a couple of blocks to The Yarn Company but was feeling so burnt out that even a sale on Koigu KPPM was too much for me. I couldn't make a decision anymore, and I knew if I tried, I'd just end up with more blue yarn, so I decided to call it a day.

And here is my little yarn haul (apologies for the flash in the picture, but the non-flash shot was mud):

More on my new desk and using my lovely crystal cake stand to display yarn some other time...

We thought of hitting Habu, School Products, and/or the Lion Brand Yarn Studio on Monday after taking Isobel to the top of the Empire State Building, but it was chilly and Isobel is battling a cold, so I have yet to visit these stores. I'm kind of happy to have saved some special places for future visits, as well as the Brooklyn yarn stores.