Many things in the works, so I do promise to be better about making time to write posts!
To start, I want to talk about what I honestly mean this time is THE LAST MAJOR YARN PURCHASING OF 2014 (more on that later).
I took another trip across the border to visit my family, and this time I was there for a week. In that week, I managed to make one trip to a new yarn store (which I am IN LOVE with…they have ALL THE QUINCE & CO.) and also purchased yarn at a festival (not a yarn festival). The festival was the main reason I found myself in town and I knew that they’d had a yarn vendor there previously, so I was fully expecting to purchase some yarn at the festival. I was not expecting to purchase what I did.
For context, the festival in question is a rather large Irish heritage festival (my mother’s mother is from Ireland), and in the past they have had a charming independent vendor from Ireland selling some of the yarn spun from their sheep. I’ve never actually purchased any of this yarn, but this year I told myself that if they were back, I would make the commitment to purchasing a bit of yarn. Well, this particular vendor was not there, but I was not disappointed on the yarn front. This year, the festival had a representative from Studio Donegal, and she had brought several baskets of various colours of their Soft Donegal yarn. Having just purchased two skeins of their Soft Donegal back in July during my trip to California, I knew that I wanted to buy enough to make myself an Aran sweater. So, after much deliberation of colours and much of my mother raising her eyebrows at me about how much I was about to spend on yarn, I purchased 5 skeins of their purple colour. And then, upon getting it home, I realised that in order to make the sweater I wanted I probably needed 6 skeins. But I’ll burn that bridge when I get there.
A few days after the festival, I wanted to take a trip to another one of the few local yarn stores I had discovered the last time I was in town. This one had hours that were rather inconvenient (my mother was going to work during the week and I was working from my parents’ house) as the only day they were open past 6pm was the day I was leaving town at noon. But I managed to convinced my mother to leave work early one day so that we could go, and I’m really glad we did.
The shop was charming on the inside AND the outside, and the two women working there were extremely kind and helpful. On top of that, they wound all my yarn into cakes for me, which I greatly appreciate as I don’t own a swift. But, best of all, they had shelves upon shelves upon shelves of Quince & Co. Even better than that, I was in mighty need of some Quince & Co. to make one of the billions of Cecily Glowik-MacDonald sweaters I had added to my Ravelry queue. Previously, I’d taken some time with SO to sit down and narrow down some of the sweater options and taken notes on which yarn I would need and how much of it I would need and then headed to my LYS (where they used to have a shelf of Quince & Co.), but their shelves were rather bare on the Quince & Co. front and I ended up not purchasing. So, after many frantic text messages to SO to ask him if he happened to be home and could look at the list, then several texts back from him about what yarns I had picked out for which sweater I managed to pick out just what I needed.
The yarn is Quince & Co. Chickadee in the River colourway, and it’s destined to become the Irina sweater by Cecily Glowik MacDonald (hopefully sometime this fall)
While I was there, I also picked up some other yarn that I needed for some gift knitting projects. For a Ravelry swap I’m in, I needed to knit someone a scarf, so I picked up a few skeins of Cascade 220 in forest green and yellow. I can’t yet talk about what the scarf design is since the swap package hasn’t arrived yet, but I will post about it as soon as I can.
I also picked up some Cascade 220 superwash sport (which I’m still bitter about not being 220 yards/skein) in basic black to knit a hat for my father for his birthday at the end of October.
So…overall I managed to come home with 18 new skeins of yarn to put in an already full yarn drawer, but I told myself that 6 of them are getting used nearly immediately and if all goes well the Quince & Co will be getting knit up soon too. Still…I knew it meant that I was about to need a yarn intervention. It was a few more weeks before that happened, but it has happened and I’ll be sure to tell you all about it as soon as we get through the pile of other things that happened in the interim.
It’s been an exciting summer/end of summer on the crafting front, and has no promises of slowing down. Thanks for making the journey with me.
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