My Excellent Adventure

Today I had an adventure!

I shopped downtown in an unfamiliar city where a yarn store was going out of business and had everything on sale for 30% off.

When I finally found parking near the store (I am not one who likes to parallel park on a busy street), I bought a pay-and-display ticket for one hour and 20 minutes and walked the couple of blocks to the yarn store and looked in the window.

I saw a sign.

"Closed Sunday, Monday, Tuesday. Open Wednesday 10:00 to 5:00, Thursday 1:00 to 5:00, Friday 1:00 to 5:00. Saturday 10:00 to 5:00."

Or something like that.

It was only 11:45 on Friday morning, which meant that I had about an hour to kill. I walked a bit until I found an Indian bistro nearby. I was not hungry for lunch yet, but luckily, this place had a special on samosas. While I was eating I admired the decor of the place, rich colours of terra cotta and fuchsia, maroon and moss green, turquoise blue and yellow the colour of curry. I tried to memorize the palette so that I can reproduce it someday in my knitting.

Two Skeins of Noro Cash Iroha

When I had eaten my lunch and killed enough time to make it worthwhile I went back to the pay-and-display, paid for more parking, and made my way to the yarn store yet again.

The yarn store was full of lovely, lovely yarn. It was about the size of my kitchen and it took me a half-hour of browsing to decide what to buy. I had to avoid browsing for books. By the time I'd been in the store 10 minutes I was pouring with sweat from the humid weather. I had my eye on a Kaffe Fasset hardcover, but I was afraid to flip through the pages in case I dripped on them. Besides, my knitting just isn't at that level yet and I didn't want to intimidate myself.

So here is what I came home with:

• a Hiya Hiya circular needle
  
• some Noro Cash Iroha in a gorgeous fuschia (seen above)
  
• some yarn destined for my secret swap partner that I know she will love
  
• another small item for my swap partner
  
• a huge 200g skein of JJ's Kaleidoscope 8-ply wool, hand-dyed by Jan Gilray in greens and blues

Kaleidoscope

The Kaleidoscope yarn is from New Zealand. I'm not sure how it ended up here, but I bought it anyway. There was a basket of Philosopher's Wool nearby, which is a Canadian wool I have been interested in for a while after seeing it on the Internet. But when I picked it up it was chunkier than I expected and I didn't like the rough feel of it. It just shows how much better it is to go to yarn stores and actually fondle the yarn when you think you see something you admire.