Moving forwards again

Today was a great day! I met up with my wonderful friends from Sew Group for an afternoon of fabric and yarn shopping in some new and unexplored shops. It's a real treat to have such good friends to shop with and spend time together, and I hope they all had as much fun as I did.

Piedmont Fabrics was started by a former employee at the now defunct Poppy fabrics, and East Bay institution that sadly closed last autumn. She's done a great job getting together a collection of interesting fabrics at a wide range of prices, with very knowledgeable staff to assist. The button selection was terrific as well. A definite go-back-to place.

As I can spend far more time in a yarn shop than can my friends, I headed over to Piedmont Yarns & Apparel while the gang was finishing up their purchases at the fabric store. It's a small shop, but with an interesting selection of yarns I don't see in other stores - many hand-dyed brands; some they dyed themselves (probably with Knit Picks Bare as the base yarn), as well as vegetable-dyed fibres from A Verb for Keeping Warm. I work with one of the ladies from this company at my job at the Museum, and she's a real sweetheart and her fibres are beautiful.

I was very restrained and contented myself with two skeins of Mirasol Hacho hand dyed wool. Ravelry thinks it's a DK weight but I'd call it a sportweight. I got one skein each of a magenta/fuchsia mix and a blues mix, and plan to do some sort of striped multi-patterned socks with them. I probably should have gotten 1 more skein to really be enough but if that's true it will be a good incentive to go back soon.

And the good news - TW's vest redo is all done and now it's the right length. The unravelling process was more painful than expected - i know that unraveling from the bottom up isn't really a smooth operation, but the stitch pattern made it worse than planned. But it's all done and we're both happy with it. Of course, now that it's really wearable we've had a heat wave and it's nearly 80 degrees outside but that will change soon enough.