Stash Confessional: Minnesota Yarn Shop Hop 2015

Well, you know how I was saying that I had a new way to keep the stashdown resolution and how I was going to do better? Well... I am doing better with knitting. I'm doing less well with not buying yarn.

So, every year several of the local yarn stores get together for what we call "Minnesota Yarn Shop Hop" over one weekend in April. The ultimate goal is for people to go around to all of the stores on the list (there are 17 this year) and there's a free pattern and an exclusive yarn and perks for donating to a local food shelf and prize entries and a grand prize entry for people who go to all the stores. It's good exposure for the stores and the indie dyers they work with and it's a good cause and it's a lot of fun. This was my first year participating. I wasn't going to really go all out, just have Jonas drive me to some of the stores that are closer to us, but one of my knitter friends ended up having Friday off and wanted to go, so I took the day off and went along, foolishly telling myself I wasn't going to buy things no matter what.

And then it ended like this:

To make matters worse, Jonas' father is also a knitter and we'd arranged to meet him at one of the shops already on Saturday, so I went back to one and bought myself a skein of lovely purple/grey/tan coloured Kauni that I'd been coveting since I saw someone with it in the Game of Thrones swap and is the perfect Daenerys Targaryen colourway. It's not pictured here, but I have it.

So here's the damage, left to right:

1. (I admit that I have no idea what this yarn is properly called, so I'm making things up) Trippin' With Dixi Perfectly Prime The Adventure Continues in the Amigos Colourway. It's 434yds (396.8m)/100 g of fingering weight 75% superwash Columbia wool and 25% nylon. It's not generally my style, but I found one that was a bit more muted and had the bright pops of colour instead of the all over riot of colour that many of them had, and I'm hoping it will make some nice socks when I get around to it.

2. Hazel Knits (AKA my new favourite dyer because all their things are BEAUTIFUL). It's 400 yards (365.8m)/100g of fingering weight MCS in a sky/cornflower blue colour that's far more variegated than what's showing up above. They actually had three different choices (and a TON more Hazel Knits that weren't exclusives) and I wanted the orange one, but I look terrible in orange. Jonas has since purchased the orange along with a contrasting brown colour for himself and is browsing patterns for me to make out of it as I type this.

To give you an idea, here's a photo of all three colours:

It's all lovely and I want all of it. It's even more stunning in person than it's showing up on my screen.


3. This one also isn't really named beyond "Needlework Unlimited MN Yarn Shop Hop 2015". It's inspired by Maurice Sendak's Illustrations, which I love. They had 4 colours, though I don't have a photo of all of them. One was an orange shade one was yellow and they also had a grey. I chose the pale green because I liked the colour and because it was named for one of my favourite Maurice Sendak books "All The World Around". It's 218yds (199.3m)/100g of superwash DK wool that doesn't feel at all like a superwash and is really just a very lovely wool.

4. This is from my one true LYS, Steven Be, who went all out for shop hop with about a billion exclusive colourways, a popcorn machine, and all the fabulousness. Because that's the Steven Be way. Why do something if you don't do it big? I chose this colour out of the billions because it does this neat thing where it looks very different when you hold it up next to various colours. It's a Hedgehog Fibres yarn aptly named "Graphite" and sometimes looks purple, sometimes grey, sometimes brown, and sometimes black. I love colours like this and I couldn't resist this one. It's 330yds (350.2m)/100g of fingering weight 90% merino/10% nylon and will make me some lovely socks, I'm sure.

That's it for shop hop exclusives, but I'd be remiss if I didn't include the skein of Kauni I bought on Saturday in this post, as it's definitely adding to my stash AND I bought it without a plan, which is a direct violation of everything I'm supposed to be doing. But I'm a sucker for Denmark and a sucker for Daenerys and Jonas approved the purchase so I'm calling it "fine, but I feel bad about it". Hopefully I can find the loveliest thing for it to become and all will soon be happy.

Here's the image from the Kauni website so you can get a sense of how beautiful it is:

It's 600m (650yds)/150g in sport weight wool and I am in love with it. So there.


I also managed to go to two other stores and not purchase anything. One, the exclusive yarns were from Sun Valley Fibres, who I love, but the colours didn't grab me and I know I'll be in very close proximity to their yarns when I'm in grad school, so I opted out. The other was Three Irish Girls and they were out when I got there, so I would have had to order it. I wasn't in love with it and definitely wasn't in love with the way it knit up, so I opted out again. The kicker with that store was... they have Brooklyn Tweed. That's right. Brooklyn Tweed Shelter and Loft in various colours right here in Minnesota and I had no idea. It's a good thing Jonas was along for that trip, otherwise I make no promises that I wouldn't have come out of there with a sweater quantity and ruined all my carefully laid destashing plans. But now I know where it is and as soon as I finish all these sweater quantities I have stacked up (or as soon as I *NEED* to knit a hat out of Shelter) I know where I can find it!


So, in total, I managed to do the following damage to my destashing:
2032yds (1914.8m) --AKA the amount I'm supposed to get RID of this month... negating the giant stockinette sweater of awesome by several yards/550g.

Not good, but at least I'm replacing sweater yarn with sock yarn? And I'm consoling myself with the knowledge that this will be the last big binge before school starts and I'm officially beyond broke. Right? Right.