Sunday, April 13, 2008

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.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You continue to amaze me! I am so impressed that you were able to not only rip back to the desired length but to finish this so quickly!! It is impressive.

Ruthie

MmmYarn said...

Hooray again, now that it is finished again! It looks great. But you are right - this past weekend was no time to be contemplating wearing any woolies at all. -- Kirsten