Acquisitions/Stash Management

Well this week was a bumper week for enhancing my stash! No superwash yarns though which is good. 😀

From Wool Warehouse I wanted to try out some different red yarns. I’m going to combine these together, the yarns are slightly darker than in the photo. I’m thinking hat and mittens maybe.

I also bought a ball of Rowan Brushed Fleece 50g (65% wool, 30% alpaca, 5% polymide) that you can see in the Accessories section below.

---

On Friday I met up with Marilee, who some of you may know from her Quite a Yarn blog. She and her husband were over visiting London and he had his own plans for Friday, which gave Marilee a free day. So I was up about 4.30am and flew down to meet her. We had brunch, visited Loop, went to Liberty London shop, went for a small afternoon tea, went to Beautiful Knitters and then it was time to head back to the airport. I got home around 11pm so a full packed lovely day.

From Loop I bought some La Bien Aimée Corrie Worsted (75% Corriedale and 25% Gotland), John Arbon Yarnadelic Sport weight (100% Corriedale), 2 x balls of CaMaRose Midnatssol Lace weight (54% alpaca, 36% tencel, 10% merino) and a kit. The kit contains 2 x 50g balls of Isager Highland 3 ply and a pattern to make some Pinwheel mitts. It says you should have enough for 2 pairs if you reverse the colours on the 2nd pair.

The plan is to combine the burgundy wool and alpaca yarns together…but plans can change.

Later in the day we went to Beautiful Knitters, which is a much smaller shop but packed with yarns. No yarns took my fancy in there, but they had some lovely pattern books and although it was quite expensive I did treat myself to this mitten book. There’s colourwork, intarsia, cable mittens so a real selection and I’m looking forward to giving some of these a go.

I think if you are short on time in London then Loop is definitely recommended. I saw so many yarns that you see mentioned on the Grocery Girls YouTube episodes: Myak, Spincycle (astronomically/mindblowingly expensive!!), Brooklyn Tweed, Madeline Tosh, etc. But it’s not all imported yarns and they have a good selection of British yarns like John Arbon, Jamieson’s of Shetland, Eden Cottage yarns. Beautiful Knitters isn’t too far from Victoria station though and still worth a visit.

I managed to pick a Jamieson’s colour that I am going to make a future jumper with, but no rush on buying that yet.

Knitting

Accessories

With the Rowan brushed fleece I have cast on a Fisherman’s Rib cowl…its incredible soft and the structure of the fisherman’s rib should make it very warm. It leans more of an orangeish than a blueish red, but not as orange as the photo is showing.

---

Other News

Well I’ve pretty much covered all my news above. Once my cowl is done I shall get back to knitting my jumper.

One final thing to mention, is the enormous display in Liberty, covered in crochet, knitting, pompoms and more yarn. They had more yarnie displays in their front windows, including one with these crocheted bananas.

---

This is a Year of Projects post. Officially the Group is in its 13th year, but this is my 6th year participating. If you would like to find more about the Year of Projects Group on Ravelry, as you’d be very welcome to join us. (There are 53 Sundays this YOP year, it happens sometimes!).

Year 13 list.