Friday, June 17, 2011

Knitting Out West

Greetings! I am back from my trip to West Coast to visit the fabulous Ariel. It was my first time to the San Francisco/Oakland area and it was great. A wonderful mix of sight-seeing, eating, imbibing and knitting. Since this is a knitting blog,I figured this first post will focus on the knitting bits.
My first day there we popped into Article Pract in Oakland.  A wonderful store with a large variety of yarn, really helpful staff and they were having a sale. A sale on ALL yarn. Really, it would have been simply rude to not buy anything. (I am all about the good manners.) As much as I love stripey and variegated sock yarns, I realized that for certain patterns I really need to have some nice solid tonal yarns in my stash.  This madelinetosh sock is so soft and the color just so heavenly.

tosh sock

A trip to the Mission had to include a stop at ImagiKnit. A big store with a huge variety of yarns, where I think I was so overwhelmed I walked away empty-handed. But being the good friend that I am, I did find perfect green yarn that she simply I knew Ariel would be unable to resist. I can spot Ariel green's and orange's from a good 15 feet away.

I really wanted "souvenir yarn" something either spun or dyed local so we hit up  Piedmont Yarn for some of their hand-dyed Piedmont Wildsocks. I am pretty certain I already have the pattern chosen for this yarn. Stay tuned...

Piedmont Yarn Hand-Dyed

Even better than the new yarn, it was so wonderful just to hang out with Ariel and knit. It reminded me how much I miss knitting with others.   Our weekly group kind of faded away a while back and while I have seen some of my knittah's socially we haven't sat and knit together for a long time. Ariel and I would pull out our socks and knit all over the place. We scoured projects on ravelry together when we discovered a shawl pattern we loved from someone we met at Article Pract. I may have even have been molested by some of her stash. (I am working hard to repress that memory).   We chatted with one sweet woman on BART whose husband was very well-trained to feign interest in the difference between DPN's and circulars.  Nearly any time we stopped to rest our weary feet out came the knitting. A fellow knitter understands that we are not leaving the cafe in North Beach until I have finished turning the heel.  I loved when one of her friends asked us how we knew each other and Ariel said simply "knitting". The look on his face was one of such confusion, it was priceless.  One evening after a lot of walking, Ariel said "How 'bout wine, knitting and Firefly?" and I could not imagine anything better. 


Sock and A Beer
My sock in progress while enjoying an afternoon beer.

1 comment:

Ariel said...

That green yarn is still prominently displayed as a centerpiece in the middle of my dining room table. It's almost too pretty to knit. And I'm so very glad you came to visit (not just because of the green yarn). It was a really excellent reminder of just how awesome my knittahs are, and just how much I miss them.