2026 yarn crawl

Well that was fun. It’s been a weekend full of lots of different things so this seems like it was forever ago, but in fact it was just Friday. I’ve got some vacation to burn, so I took the day off to have breakfast with a friend after which we moseyed over to the local yarn shop for the first day of this year’s Bay Area Yarn Crawl. Ahem. This is the chaos that resulted. The bag on the left is mine, the pile of books and the basket is hers. We certainly did some shopping!! 

I also snagged a couple of pattern books (free!) but I admit I didn’t have a whole lot of patience to sift through them all. I did, however, do a great job picking through the sale yarn outside and here’s what I got. It’s all cotton or cotton blends, which is something I appreciate so much about this shop - she carries great non-wool options. The four colorful skeins on the right, and possibly the hank, will be headed to my mom. The four neutral balls on the bottom are going to be great for gnomes, particularly the white and gray for beards and noses. I wish I had just one more ball of that fluffy yellow because then I would know exactly what sweater I would make, but as it is I might be a bit too short to want to play yarn chicken. Still, it’s so soft and I’ll find something to make with it. 

 

Once we managed to get inside, it was really fun to look around the trunk shows Kristi had displayed. She ordinarily has a great selection of yarns but boy these indie dyers did not disappoint! The whole bottom row of skeins is from those trunk shows. The left, highly variegated yarn is from Forbidden Fibers Co and will be my first (brave!) foray into a super variegated sweater and learning to alternate skeins. The rest of the bottom row is from a dyer with moody colors I just loved called Dragon Hoard Yarn. I limited myself to tonal skeins for projects I had picked out otherwise I would have come home with many more of her beautiful variegated works. The set of four purpley red will be a sweater, likely an Amrum. The dark slate blue will be an Architexture scarf, and the other one? Well that was kind of a compromise impulse buy. I think it might make a nice second Architexture, if I like knitting that pattern, or I will find something to do with it. I have many fingering weight shawl patterns, and it was too pretty to pass up. The bright green at the top is going to be a Geddy tee, the Noro (another sale yarn) and navy might end up as a sweater or vest - definitely a garment of some sort. And the last skein was a total no plan but I kept walking by the cubby and picking it up. There were many more so I could have gotten another sweater quantity, but this one seems to say accessory to me.

Safe to say I have supported my local yarn shop, and I have plenty of projects planned for the year! These of course are all in addition to the ones I already have queued up from my stash. My I’ve gotten ambitious. There may not be enough hours in a day. I did decide I don’t need to do anymore yarn crawling over the next week. I have a trip down to Pacific Grove next weekend, so I will certainly come home with something fun from my other favorite yarn shop, but other than that this is plenty of yarn to keep me busy for a good while.