Jon's Knit Blog

Keeping LYS's In Business, One at a Time

So part of my grand tour of Seattle included visits to three lovely yarn shops: Hilltop Yarn, Weaving Works, and Tricoter (of the famous Tricoter books!). All three were lovely stores and I purchased something at each of the shops.

At Hilltop, I found a colorway of Shepherd Sock I've been wanting (because, you know, I don't have enough sock yarn sitting around in this apartment). Embers is the colorway, it's reds and blacks and greys and a bit of purple works its way in there... I want to use this one to make some socks for Mom. I also bought some Kersti, in a lovely purples and grey, and some Chinchilla, which is a furry floofy "yarn" in a purple to make the purple scarf for my purple-loving co-worker. Although I'm worried it may turn out too yummy to give away. I also bought a few needles here.

At Weaving Works, I bought a skein of Colinette Enigma in the Morocco colorway, also to make a simple scarf, though I may do K2, *YO, P2TOG, rep from * til 2 sts rem., K2 for the RS rows (and simply K the WS). I think that might be very pretty and show off the luciousness of Enigma. I bought a few more needles here. I'm stocking up on the Addi's so I can do the socks-on-two-circs thing and the Dale-sleeve-on-two-circs thing as well. I just hope my choice of US4's rather than 3's was the right one. We'll know in a couple days, I imagine. They also had Spindrift at Weaving Works, and I played around with some for a while, thinking that I might find the colors I had in my imagination when I came up with my current "Fair Isle" project in my mind's eye, but it just didn't feel right so the lovely yarns stayed in Seattle. Someone nice up there in the PNW, please go free this yarn from the shelf on which is it currently ensconced!

Tricoter was an astonishing shop. They sort the yarn by color rather than by type of yarn. This is overwhelming, and makes it sort of hard to find anything but it is a wonderful orgy of color. It was also not an inexpensive store. I fell in love with an afghan pattern there in the store (The Man's Throw from their "Sweaters for Men" book). This afghan calls for 66 balls of a fingering weight cashmere/silk blend. Each ball is ~140 yards. Each ball is $13.75 in this store. This is a $907.50 price tag. While I still want to make the afghan (and I bought the pattern), I don't want to spend $907.50 on it. The pattern is really cool, though -- it's a giant ribbed cable worked as an all-over design. So really, the pattern is the only thing I bought there at Tricoter, but I still bought something. And I thought they were really nice. If I didn't already have so much yarn to knit up into so many various and wonderful things, I would have loved to buy a TON of yarn at Tricoter.

So now I have lots of projects to work on and hopefully to finish, but first, I have to get some sleep. I just got home (I took the red-eye back) and I was blogging while waiting for the air conditioner to do its magic and get the apartment to a comfortable, sleepable temperature. And now it is, so I am off to go get my four hours of sleep before heading to work. I just hope it's enough so that I'm not too tired to knit when I get home tonight!

Posted by Jon at July 9, 2004 07:21 AM