Stash Enhancement

Yesterday I went on a "Yarn Crawl" of Richmond with Beth. Here's what I came home with:

I know, I know....much much more than I intended on coming home with. We started with Lettuce Knit, a cute store with a HUGE selection in a stip mall near Stony Point Mall. As we were pulling in to the shopping center I saw girl scouts selling their yummy cookies so we stopped and loaded up. That was the first sign it was going to be a good day. We then walked over to Lettuce Knit and ohmigoodness what a treat-they were in the midst of their semi-annual blowout sale. Up to 40% off some yarns!!! The store was packed and yarn was everywhere! Beth found some pumpkin-colored yarn for 40% off that she'd been wanting and I saw lots of everything I wanted. I settled on getting 10 balls of Elsbeth Lavold Chunky AL-enough to do a simple sweater. I also got a pattern book-Rowan Bigger Picture-based on a sample they had on the wall. I didn't get the yarn (Rowan Big Wool) there because they didn't have enough of the color that I liked, but I will order it online. Next up was The Knitting Basket. It was off of Grove St, kind of downstairs and on the back side of the building. They had a very impressive book and magazine collection (including back issues dating to the early 00's) but their yarn selection was a little lacking compared to Lettuce Knit. They had a sample knit up of the alphabet baby blanket from The Baby Knits Book by Debbie Bliss. I'd seen this knit up at Sweetpea Knits, one of my favorite blogs (see sidebar) and it's so soft. I bought the book. I don't have a particular future baby in mind, but we'll see how long it takes to make. Maybe it could be for my own one day. I didn't buy the yarn for that either, they had a good baby yarn selection, and good prices, I just didn't see this as a project I'd be starting soon. The third store was the Yarn Lounge in Carytown. This was my first visit to Carytown, and I liked it. Very hip shopping area with some cool sidewalk cafes. This shop was very modern, minimal selection but lots of quality stuff. They have lots of great samples to drool over. One caught my eye not so much for the colors but the texture of the yarn. I poured over patterns for quite a while trying to find the pattern that was the excuse to buy the yarn. I finally found it. I can't even begin to describe how soft this yarn is.

It's a cashmere/merino blend. I'd never heard of the brand before (RYC) but they had a great selection of yarns, mostly DK and 4-ply, with one aran-weight. I was debating between this and a striped v-neck sweater but I decided on this for a few reasons: 1) I'm still working on the last sweater I attempted 2)said sweater was all stockinette and rib and soooo boring after a few inches 3) see the beads? see the lace? different, challenging, the makings of something to keep me interested and finally, 4) smaller project=less time till I can start something new. Plus, it's PINK so I can start it for Project Spectrum. I've made a decision that I'm not doing anything else (except start those socks, whoops) until Tubey is finished. Speaking of, here is the current state of Tubey:

She is SO close to being finished. About 5 more inches. I *hope* to finish her today. It's hard to get motivated to knit a 100% alpaca sweater when it's 70 degrees outside, but that's what I get for procrastinating. The last store we went to was one we had visited before, Got Yarn in Midlothian. Beth needed to get another ball of alpaca (the same yarn from the nose ring incident) to complete her scarf. I couldn't leave a yarn store empty handed so I was browsing the sock yarn (*note-the previous three yarn stores didn't have a very good selection of sock yarn-the only one that could even begin to say they had sock yarn was the knitting basket but their color selection didn't do anything for me). I found Lorna's Lace in a beautiful colorway that reminds me of a rose garden-deep greens and bold pinks. Perfect! Another pink-ish yarn that can count for Project Spectrum (March is 80 days long, right?). I was browsing the store to see if they had anything new and we found a sample sweater vest knit up in the very same sparkly yarn that I bought the last time we went yarn-hunting. It was gorgeous and had such beautiful drape. The lady showed us the book she used to compute the pattern, and I got it. The Knitter's Handy Book of Patterns-you can plug in what guage your yarn is, your size and what you want to make and get a pattern for basically everything. I am going to make a sweater-vest sort of thing, but with a cowl-neck so it wil be just a sleeveless sweatery thing. So that was our day, interspersed with a few Starbucks stops, some knitting in public, and people-watching. I'll leave you with the sock(s) I started a few days ago in the lovely Neopolitan colorway. So far so good, but we'll see what happens when I get to the heel flap.