A “yarn crawl” is when you visit a couple yarn shops you either haven't been to before or are outside your normal day-to-day shopping area. You go to view what they have even if you don't have a purchase in mind. They can be very dangerous --- to your pocketbook. But they can also be a wonderful way to find new locations and new yarns. What the uninitiated don't know is that yarn shops have their own personalities. Since we are currently blessed with a wide variety of yarn vendors the yarn shops can choose to focus on a few types with great depth or a wide range of fiber (breadth).
The first destination today was River Knits in Lafayette, Indiana. This is a favorite shop of mine. The owner has a good range of great yarns and experiments with new yarn lines. This works well in a college town with a combination of novice and experienced knitters. The shop is located in an older part of the downtown area and is a great area to explore after you have saturated yourself in color, texture, and hard to resist fibers (you cannot take them all home – she has more than the largest stash you would dare to try to fit in your home. I could say much more about the shop (and probably will in future posts) but this is about a yarn crawl so we move on.
After leaving River Knits it was time for lunch and it was across the street to a local tea room (The Shepardess, Buttery Shelf Eatery). The decor is rustic Shaker style and it is operated by a non-profit charitable organization. Well worth a stop. We then explored the area to discover what other local shops had to offer. There were a couple antique and decorator shops, coffee house, pubs, and a very important stop at Kathy's Homemade Kandies. Even if you don't have a sweet tooth it is a great place to stop for a cool (or hot) drink, but I dare you not to try one of their treats that they make so well (chocolate truffles, caramels, and candies of all kinds).
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We then headed south to stop in downtown Zionsville to find the Village Yarn Shop. My friend D and I had not been there before but will return many times in the future. The shop layout welcomes you as you walk in the door. Not only are the yarns displayed across the walls like a rainbow of color – transitioning from one shade to the next – but there are comfortable chairs and sofas to invite a knitter to sit down. This is a shop that is focusing on breadth. In it you will find practically the FULL range of Cascade yarns in color and fiber content. There is also a very good range of many other yarn lines like Mountain Colors, the Kaffe Fassett color line of Regia sock yarn, Mini Mochi, Alpaca with a Twist, Blue Sky, and many more. The shop has been in business for 1 year and I expect it will be a favorite of many who find it.
Village Yarn Shop already has a special spot in my shop list. One reason I had River Knits first on the yarn crawl today was because I needed 1 more skein of yarn for the current knit project – the Vernal Equinox Shawl (designer photo gallery). I had purchased the yarn 2 years ago so I didn't expect to find it since the particular colorway is no longer made. River Knits did not have the expired color and the current colors of the same yarn did not come close enough. But imagine my surprise when we mentioned the hunt for a skein of this yarn when the shop owner at the Village Yarn Shop knew exactly what yarn I was referring to and found the last skein on her display wall. We were surprised to discover that it even matched the dye lot. AMAZING.She also had additional skeins of the Mini Mochi yarn that I had purchased earlier in the day from the first shop (different dye lot but it should still work). This kind of serendipity occasionally happens during a yarn crawl event because it is both the exploration, the find, and the fun.
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