Memories of Wool

Here is another pair of visits to the woolly community that we made last year (2008). Please excuse the gaping spaces in the blog text - the Google-Gremlins are attacking my HTML, possibly because I'm trying to do by hand what the Google-team want to do for you.

Firstly, with where some of the wool comes from.

Foxbriar Farm

Almost a year ago we went out to a small town called Tabernacle, near Mt. Holly in NJ, and visited a couple who were running an Alpaca farm. They're not the only ones here in the area with unusual animals, but I thought I'd feature them here.

---

Next, here's some pictures of a really good shop. They have a large selection of yarns and a huge selection of buttons. They're in the Germantown part of Philadelphia, right on a bus route for convenience. As you can see, there's a plaque stating just how historic the building is.

The Knit With Yarns.

To the right, the shop's shingle makes it clear what's inside: below you see the tag on the building - it's been here for quite a while !
Just a few buttons in stock, for any cardigan you could dream of !	Yarn falling from the ceiling - there's really a lot of wool here.

---

There'll be more pictures up in just a few days, but first I have to do some programming !

Knothing But Knitting for Ewe

Last year we did a kind of tour around all the yarn shops in the Philadelphia area that my wife could find in the phone book, etc. I came along (usually as driver), and took pictures. Here are some of them. What I will say, before all of these, is that the knitting community has some of the friendliest people around. Knitting To Know Ewe, Wrightstown, PA This may look totally disorganised, but really it seems that it's very easy to find things. Here's a selection of their wools - just a beautiful colour array. Loop, South Street, Philadelphia Loop is one of no less than three yarn shops on South Street. It's a very modern store, with beautiful new hardwood floors and a very Scandinavian feel to it. One of their favourite tricks is to arrange skeins of hand-dyed yarn of very similar colours in arrays on the walls. It took me a long time to persuade my digital camera to reproduce what my eyes were telling me were the colours. In these two you see a span of oranges and a span of blues. You have to believe me when I tell you that it took about 25 pictures to get the colours in the camera to match those on the wall! In the end I had to resort to holding my had in front of the light source to get the camera to register colour corectly. Then, of course, there was the smell of scorching flesh if I did that for too long !

The background image above is a close-up of an array of hand-dyed yarn from Loop's wall. I'm not too sure that the effect is working too well with the text, unfortunately, but it certainly is an interesting example of what you can achieve within the limits of the HTML you can include in a blog.

More woolly things next time.