I had planned to go out on a yarn expedition, but didn't much feel like going out in the storm. So I stayed home awhile, working on some freelance projects. By early afternoon I was going a little stir-crazy, wanting to get outside and do something, so I went ahead and took off. Most of the yarn shops around here are gone--just like the independent bookstores being crowded out by Border's and Barnes & Noble, the yarn shops have gone, leaving in their wake a few sad aisles of generic yarn at Hobby Lobby and Michael's.
Oh, there are a few cool mass-produced yarns, but I wanted something unique. Well, I really just wanted to go to a real yarn store, to be able to look at every possible size and kind of needle, to look at a bunch of different kinds of yarn, and browse through more pattern books than a half-dozen "crochet fridgies" leaflets.
I knew there was a yarn store in Olathe (my hairdresser, an avid afghan crocheter, had mentioned it), but I'd never been there. I looked up the address in the phone book and took off. The rain didn't make the adventure particularly pleasant, but I finally found the shop in a delapidated little strip mall. The shop was kind of fun--small, and not a huge selection, but a nice little rack of one-off discontinued yarns, of which I bought a half-dozen skeins to play with.
They didn't have much in the way of a needle selection, but I did find a pair of 10 inch size 2's, which is one of the things I was looking for. By the time I finished browsing, I was starving, not having eaten lunch, so I stopped at a Subway and had a sandwich, then reviewed my options. It was mid-afternoon by then, and the sun was finally coming out, so I decided to continue my odyssey by driving to the only other yarn shop I know of within a reasonable distance--The Yarn Barn in Lawrence.
Lawrence is kind of a funky college town, and the yarn shop is on the main drag, a street of old buildings housing lots of interesting shops. In contrast to the other shop, this one didn't have much in the way of yarn that interested me, but they had a huge needle selection, and I ended up buying a couple of sets of small doublepointed needles, and treated myself to a pair of Brittany birch needles in size 4, my favorite size.
To be fair, the shop has turned into more of a spinning and weaving shop, I think, so a lot of their inventory was cones of yarn meant more for weaving than for hand knitting. I just didn't find anything particularly exciting there. I spent a long time looking at the pattern books, and carried a few around with me, but in the end didn't buy any. I've found lots of free patterns on the web, and I thought I'd content myself with those for awhile.
Last night I stopped at the library and picked up an armload of pattern books, but haven't taken the time to go through them yet. A lot of the fun for me is just looking and dreaming, and buying supplies. I look at it like Bob poring through the fishing equipment catalogs and buying flies--kind of the same thing, just a different hobby.
I think that line, "My favorite size" is from Winnie the Pooh, isn't it? Something about, "The same size as Piglet, my favorite size," something like that. I'll have to look it up . . . Ah, here it is: "About as big as Piglet," Eeyore said to himself sadly. "My favorite size. Well, well."
That also makes me think of an old Dennis the Menace episode where one of Dennis's parents mentioned someone that they "thought was a medium." Dennis thought for a second, then said, "I think I'm a small."
