Feeding the Stash

I'm expecting treasure from the UPS man today.

I should explain that I don't have a LYS. I have favorite yarn stores, but they are not local. The care and well-being of my stash, small as it is, requires expeditions. Excursions. Planning and execution.

There's My Sister's Knits in Beverly where the Yarn Harlot signed my copy of The Secret Life of a Knitter.



How do you think she knew? Could it be that I was one of the last 5 people in a line that stretched out the store and down the block?

Nana's Knitting is in Oak Lawn. I got the scarily huge tree branches, I mean, size 17 bamboo circulars that I used for Scribble there.










Knitche is my favorite.

It's actually my sister's local yarn store, so I never get lost when I go there. I've gone with both boys and left still feeling relaxed and happy about yarn shopping. No mean feat. The boys have even consented to return sojourns. Of course, that may be because I can bribe them with cookies when we're there, thanks to the coffee bar.

Sadly, as I turned mitered-squarish, none of them had the yarn I wanted in all the colors I wanted. Since I don't have the gift for or the guts to buy one or two colors at one store, schlep them to another and hope to find another one or two that will work, and then head off with the whole lot to a third store and . . . well, you get the idea.

Instead, I decided to give up the tactile experience and fling myself in blind trust into the Ethernet. Sounds dramatic, doesn't it? Except that I have had reasonably good luck in the past . (Well, okay. There are those pop-art colored skeins of Noro Iro. What I thought was a foliage green and red turned out to be acid green and hot pink. Oops.) Besides, I do have Cascade 220 in my stash. So I Googled, took a chance on my monitor, my imagination and the names of the colors: Provence, Kansas and Pumpkin Spice. Should go wonderfully well with the Mallard, Shire and Charcoal.

Let me pause here to note the perfidy of a knitting daughter. I actually had 5 skeins of Pumpkin Spice before she left for college. "Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk." *

So, where is the UPS truck already? Shouldn't it have been here by the time I finished this post? The suspense is starting to tell.

Oh. And will somebody please open a yarn store here?

* Thoreau in his Journals. Referring to a dairymen's strike when there were suspicions of watered milk. I love this quote.