A bargainous trip

Well, we went, we saw, we purchased. Saturday was a day of admiring others’ work and lusting after yarns. I suspect we would have got more if we had been braver, and Amelia hadn’t beaten us to the last area of stash before we’d even left the doorway 😉
First of all, before we get into all that coolness, thanks for the lovely (and very useful) feedback on the argyle design 🙂 It has been frogged from the Regia version, and will be knitted in something more defined and crisp. More on what I’m using in a sec. I promise Necia I will try not to use the f work again, or at least too much… Ooooh, and may be ruthless and sort some stash out for selling. Or maybe not! Anyway, I’ll have another go, but I may still need advice about sizing. The stitch pattern is pretty strict and effects how the sock will fit and shape up. Maybe it could take just a bit of changing the needle size for changing the sock width. We shall see, but thank you, thank you all! The cheques are in the post…
A friend and I went to the Knitting and Crochet Guild open day, with thanks to Amelia for pointing out that they had one and making several of us very excited 🙂 And thanks to SkipNorth too for putting up pics of the yarn mountain (or a very very small section of it). We had an ace time – we were welcomed when we arrived and given a history of the guild, and the mill where they have their displays and stock. The guild are trying to get to museum status, and they need a lot of support to do so, so go along to their next open day near Holmfirth and meet the lovely people. The displays are wonderful, but because they can’t get bigger accommodation until their status improves, they have a huge amount hidden away in boxes. But those they had on display – wow 🙂 A cave with stalagtites and stalagmites, wall hangings, supersized toy blocks, knitted village and gardens, and canal/waterway crochet were just some of the things they were showing. They had piles of old equipment and patterns, and spinning wheels and swifts all over the place. The guild members were uber friendly and really helpful and chatty, and we learnt a lot from them just hanging around. They did a talk on some antique knitting and crochet too (which we missed because we were too busy drooling over yarn). The yarn, oh the yarn! Yarn mountain is not an understatement. There were cones for sale everywhere, boxes piled with packs of yarn, more boxes piled up all over the place, more cones, more boxes, and those were just the cheapy 1p a gram yarns! In fact the cones were cheaper – £5.00 for a kilo. They had lots of big brand stuff too – plenty of Addi metal and bamboo circs, drawers filled with crochet hooks, kits for crochet flowers and knitted jewellry, shelves of fibre arts books. Ohhhh and that isn’t even half of it 🙂 It was all crammed into this little unit in the mill, but they really made the most of the space.
Soooo, what you are really waiting for are some piccies… Well, I was very very restrained after the shock of the stash the other day. And I don’t get paid till the end of this week too, which meant more carefulness. I got a lot for my cash though 😀

Here we have: one addi turbo (4.5mm 100cm long) to replace the evil crappy needle I’d been using on hourglass, two hanks of Opal sock yarn ready to dye up when I buy something to colour it, 3 balls of what I am 99% sure is RYC Cashcotton 4ply in a soft pale blue (it had a different brand name on the bag it was in, but still used cashcotton in the yarn name), a cone of very lightweight yarn for lace knitting, and the Baltic Sea Stole pattern (you can buy it online, but have to pay postage for it, so I got it while it was there in front of me). The two purple balls are most definitely RYC Cashcotton 4 ply, but from Up Country, a yarn shop in the centre of Holmfirth. The sock knitting theme is pretty dominant here! The blue cashcotton will be used to test my argyle pattern again, while the purple will probably be used on a sock pattern someone gifted me ages ago and I haven’t done anything with it. I’m going to see how the argyle pattern goes first to see how it knits up and fits etc etc.
The cone, I think, is around cobweb weight. It is very very light, and looks positively Nicole Richie next to the Angelina sock yarn. See?

Can anyone confirm this, or tell me what it actually is? Anyway, I have about 340g of this stuff, which I estimate is enough for at least two very beautiful scarf/stole things. I don’t do triangular shawls or anything like that, but a light airy wrap to use as a scarf does me very nicely, hence Baltic Sea. I also adore Eunny’s gorgeous Print O’ the Wave. And if I decide I hate lace knitting with tiny yarn and tiny needles, it doesn’t matter, because the cone only cost me £1.70… Woot!