It’s July 1st. I don’t mind July. It’s in the middle of summer, which is my
favorite season of the year, so I’m good with it. My only question is: can someone tell me where June went? Seriously, it’s like I dropped off the planet
after June 7th and missed the entire rest of the month. Well, at least two weeks of the month. After the first week, I can only account for
the third week. The second and fourth
week? Yeah, I’m pretty fuzzy on exactly
what happened to the time. The only
plausible excuse I have is that I spent the second week preparing for a road
trip on the third week and spent the fourth week recovering from it all. Clear as mud, right?
So about that road trip…
I traveled to Indianapolis for a church
conference. This, in and of itself,
(although it was pretty good) would not require a post on a knitting blog, although I did KIP at the conference. See?
But stay with me; there are three totally
cool things I can share here related to this trip.
First, I got to see my son
and daughter-in-law (they live in Indy), and my mom, who converged on Indy from Ohio because she knew I was driving up. My
son had to work quite a bit, which is totally okay, as it gave us girls a
chance to spend a little time running around.
More on that later, but one of the places we landed the day before the
conference started was at a little restaurant in Zionsville, IN called
Serenity. It was a lovely place to have
some very yummy food:
The item on the upper right
of the plate was a delicious peach/white chocolate scone. I could have eaten an entire plate of those. If I worked at this place, I’d be huge. Really, really huge.
Second cool thing about the
trip was getting to see some friends at the conference that I hadn’t seen in a
while – mostly ones I knew from when I lived in Ohio.
It is always nice to see some friendly faces who “knew me when” and love
me anyways…
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| Dave & Linda! |
 |
T.J.
(otherwise known as my brother from another mother that harasses me continually
and mercilessly even though I have three older brothers already and don't need the extra trouble) |
There were more wonderful friends (Mike, Kenna, Scott, Billie, Jeanne, among others) but I didn't get a picture of all of them, or if I did get a picture, it includes me and since I decided while on my trip that my hair was a disaster, I shall not display the awfulness here and you can't make me.
And lastly, a very cool
thing about this trip was that I did have some extra time to visit…
YARN STORES! WOOT!
And here is a picture of my haul:
 |
| Yeah buddy! |
I managed to visit three
shops while in Indy. The first was in
Zionsville, the same town where I’d had the excellent lunch. It was called The Village Yarn Shop and it
was very cute. Not huge, but the owner
and/or manager was very nice and I found some Malabrigo worsted in some colors
we haven’t had in my LYS, so I snapped up a sweater quantity in one and enough
to do a hat in another.
The second shop we visited
was in an area in north Indy called Fishers.
The whole area is WAY upscale and the yarn shop, Knit Stop, was no
exception. The place was absolutely huge
– like, three times the size of my LYS – and
was filled with yarn. In fact, it was a
little overwhelming.
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Look at all those buttons...
And this is just one-third of the space they had with yarn |
They had a TON of cashmere
and cashmere blends, including one brand of pure cashmere that was priced at
$81 for ONE skein (who ARE these people?).
They had a few brands that my LYS doesn’t carry, so I picked up a skein
of Rowan Fine Art, some Dream in Color Smooshy with Cashmere (of course) sock yarn, a skein of Manos Serena
because I liked the color (although I have no idea what I could possibly make
with one skein), and two skeins of Terra by The Fibre Company. I have to say, in spite of the vast quantity of yarn and the overload of cashmere, this shop has nothing on my LYS. My LYS has Lady L. There just is no substitute for her. Actually, my favorite thing in this store was a sign that was hanging at the register:
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| Lady L. - we totally need one of these! |
I sent this picture to The
Husband while I was there and I’m not sure why, but he was not amused. No sense of humor…
The third yarn shop we
visited was in a little burb north of Indy called Broad Ripple and the shop is
named accordingly: Broad Ripple Knits. This shop was in a converted
older house and they had a nice selection of yarns – mostly stuff my LYS already carries.
The only bad thing was, this shop was quite small and there were some
ladies there knitting at a table in one of the rooms. That wouldn’t normally be a bad thing, but not
only did NONE of the ladies at the table speak a word to me (this would NEVER
happen at my LYS – everyone is smiled at and spoken to by whomever happens to
be there), but the table was so big and the room so small, it was next to
impossible to maneuver myself around in this room to even look at the yarn
which is a shame because they did carry Madelinetosh and I might have
purchased some if I’d been able to get in front of it to look at it. All that said, the one great thing I found in
this shop was some locally made yarn called Good for Ewe. What the shop carried was several different
colors of their Claddagh yarn that is a blend of Merino, baby llama,
and…DONEGAL.
I have been looking for a
really nice Donegal tweed blend for a while and most of the ones I find are
kinda scratchy. While I understand that
there is a time and a place for scratchy yarn, I have to confess that since
I’ve knit with the yumminess of Malabrigo and other assorted soft and squishy
yarns, I have a really hard time buying anything scratchy. Well this stuff is SO not scratchy. My only complaint might have been that most
of the colors are less “grown up” than I’d have liked, but that didn’t keep me
from buying a sweater’s worth of the purple and a couple of skeins each of
green, gray, and white.
My mom got in on the action and managed to
find this:
It is Classic Elite Yarns Premier and it was 50% off (it’s a discontinued yarn). My mom really liked the color and the price
was right so I have four skeins of this (all they had left) to make something
nice for her. She thinks she might like
a vest – maybe knit with some white. So,
while I found a pattern that is a possibility, I'm not in love with it, so I am still WIDE open to
suggestions and ideas. What do you
think?
Maybe I should design
something myself. Oh yeah! That’s how I spent part of June – fiddling
around with designing. But that’s a
topic for another post…
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